The pre-Climategate issue that is the issue

UPDATE: After some late night insomnia, and re-reading Steve’s essay again, I have decided to make this introduction to his essay a “top post” for a couple of days. New stories will appear below this one.

Readers, I urge you to read and digest this story, because it forms the seminal basis for everything that is wrong with Team paleoclimate science: the hard earned field work of Russian field researchers whose inconvenient data was excluded, warnings from colleagues ignored, tribalism exposed, testimony self-contradicted, whitewashes performed, and in a hat-tip to Leibig’s Law, even a “reindeer crap theory”. As one CA commenter, Peter Ward, put it:

My 13-year-old daughter asked me what I was reading. I explained at a high level and showed her figure 4. She grasped it immediately. How can we get this figure publicised widely?

I urge every climate blog to pick this utterly damning story of forensic investigation up and make it as widely known as possible. – Anthony

When I phoned Jones on the day the emails were published online and asked him what he thought was behind it, he said” It’s about Yamal, I think”.

Pearce continued (p 53):

The word turns up in 100 separate emails, more than ‘hockey stick’ or any other totem of the climate wars. The emails began with it back in 1996 and they ended with it.

Despite Jones’ premonition and its importance both in the Climategate dossier and the controversies immediately preceding Climategate, Yamal and Polar Urals received negligible attention from the “inquiries”, neither site even being mentioned by Kerry Emanuel and his fellow Oxburgh panellists.

I recently submitted an FOI request for a regional chronology combining Yamal, Polar Urals and “other shorter” chronologies referred to in an April 2006 email – a chronology that Kerry Emanuel and the “inquiries” failed to examine. The University of East Anglia, which seems to have been emboldened by the Climategate experience, not only refused to provide the chronology, but refused even to provide a list of the sites that they used to construct the regional chronology.

This refusal prompted me to re-appraise Yamal and its role in the Climategate dossier.

It appears the cardinals of deadwood at UEA and CRU have learned absolutely nothing.

Note to the person who’s running the BOT to keep posting one star like you did the last top post where over 1000 “1” star votes were logged (a new record). I have your IP address from the widget. If you keep it up, I’ll register a complaint with your ISP. In the meantime, “grow up”.

Mr McIntyre shredded my previously strongly held convictions about global warming with his various articles on the Yamal Chronology. His work pulled me out of ignorance and into the light of truth. It was a link to an article at WUWT, posted in a comment at Climate Audit that brought me here. I will never be able to thank him enough.

One tree and constantly disturbed lake sediments, two of the most unreliable proxies. A dishonest rewrite of the last 1000yrs of global temperatures.
What exactly is being taught in classrooms regards the global past temperatures?
Don’t these ‘beings’ responsible care about the doom and gloom being preached in our classrooms!

Do these people have a conscience? When Mann’s hockey stick was criticised for wiping out the MWP, they thought up the absurd excuse that the MWP was only a regional phenomenon. Then they had to disguise it int their own data.
The worst thing is that there as thick as brick Senators in Australia that believe and quote it.

McIntyre is single handedly taking apart the team. It is now clear (to even the British Press Council) just how disgraceful, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, and scientific-method abusing their behavior has been. There was a time when RealClimate tried to rebut the revelations. However, it is noticeable of late that Gavin et al have ceased even trying to spin the facts in their favor.

If you had to think up a viral plan to take down Western Civilization by planting an idea, the AGW conundrum would be hard to beat. They took too long. Natural Climate cycles kicked the Earth into reverse, and the emperor’s clothes did the rest.

A continued defense of the stick is not a bad thing. The boys have taken their scientific posture as infallible. I have not seen a single case in which a member of the clique has said, “Yes, this result is probably inaccurate (or exaggerated, or whatever). Odd isn’t it? Only Pope Benedict is infallible and then only on matters of faith, as I understand it. So the more the boys defend the undefendable, the more credibility is lost, and the more isolated they become. So sue me.

I don’t think the CRU people, or our own warminists, are particularily worried about the science – or lack of it – any more. They’ve got the politicians and the media on their side and they don’t need anything or anyone else. THey’re producing propaganda at this point.

As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.

I do not understand anything of the case Mr McIntyre has presented so ask that readers just accept that I accept it in its entirety.

But I am sorry I find the indignation expressed above by bloggers naive.

So the UEA crew cherry picked data and used inappropriate methods to make a case. By so doing they were evidently doing what they were told to do, whether implicitly or explicitly, by the organizations in which they worked. Very possibly they made a substantial contribution towards the continuation of the organisation’s funding, thereby ensuring continuity of employment and ability to feed their families.

It seems to have been the same with the enquiry teams, Russell and Oxburgh: (1) They were themselves chosen by people who believed they would produce the required whitewash and duly came up with the goods, so improving their reputation for reliability and future employment prospects. (2) They may have taken the UEA crew’s duties to the university into consideration and felt it right to let them off.

And the polemicists, eg Bob Ward and Dr Pidgeon, do what their employers want.

All these people were merely doing their jobs – more or less well according to their abilities, the difficulties of the tasks and personal enthusiasm for the work.

Some elasticity in behaviour has been required, and, if my reading of contributions to this thread is correct, deplored as personal failures. But the way people have behaved is the consequence of the institutional arrangements. What the Climategate episode, and for that matter the whole CAGW scam, reveals is a failure, not even of individual institutional arrangements, but of the way the institutions have to work together. If blame has to be placed somewhere, I suppose it should be with Government.

I have no doubt that some who post to this blog will feel affronted by these views. I take their point – that scientists have an almost religious duty to search for the truth, and that the UEA crew departed from that path in order to establish a particular truth and achieve some other end. But, in the absence of so much data, climate science is bound to be somewhat political, and the characters behaved in more or less the same way as politicians, and nobody, I take it, would believe one of them without reservations. We live in a complicated world!

The attacks on the work must continue, but do try and lay off the people!

Contrary to your opinion that bloggers’ indignation is naive, informed sceptics are utterly disgusted at the hypocrisy of the scientists, who, on one hand, decry their lofty position as scientists as being ‘above’ such things, but on the other have utterly embraced the cause of their funding masters. I say that because they have gone to the extent of abusing the scientific method (‘hide the decline‘) and subverting the peer review process (as revealed by the ‘Climategate emails’).

Many here (myself included) have gone though their own process of transformation from ‘warmist’ to ‘sceptic’ as a result of self study (of ‘both sides’). The devil is in the detail, particularly on Yamal and the other tree-ring issues. It takes time to do such reading, but it is recommended.

So, should we lay off the people – or more precisely their behaviour? They may not enjoy the limelight that their success and leading position in climate science has brought, however that they enjoy their career success is not in doubt. That success has come through the duplicity of portraying themselves as being above the base motivations of which many accuse sceptics (funding from industry to push one side of a debate), while being drawn into that very position themselves. While the aim is to avoid ad hominem comments, certain people’s behaviour has led to the elevation of AGW to its present position and their behaviour has produced the work that needs to be challenged.

To Rhoda R above: the only thing the warmanists (I prefer warmongers) have to fear is Mother Nature herself. She will have the last word.

I remember the Yamal story breaking and getting taken over by Climategate. I wonder if the whistleblower will ever reveal him/herself? And if you are reading this, do you have any more info to release?!

The cost of fuel, as well as energy, has smashed through the roof thanks to the eco-loon policies brought about by insane climate “science” and criminally inept politicians. Ordinary people, who are growing increasingly aware of the AGW scam, are becoming very angry as well as much poorer. Fortunately, tumbrils don’t require petrol and since they are a “green” method of transport we’ll get nice fat subsidies to build as many as it takes…

I’m amazed at how shabby all of this is. These guys are a club of self-congratulating fools…wrapped up in their own mythical beliefs.

A third rate bunch of people, in a new subject sprung out of “ecology” allowed to dumb down their ethics to “make the line fit” their preconceived notions, etc. A surprise?

That’s not what is amazing. Science isn’t some kind of police state, so there aren’t Gestapo style rule enforcers swooping down on rogue subjects to force them back into line. It usually works by peer (I mean science peer not climategate type peer) pressure to adhere to the scientific principle or suffer the disdain of the rest of science.

But when it goes wrong, when you get a rogue subject that just refuses to adhere to proper science and basically holds two fingers up to scientific ethics, what is amazing is that the “scientific” elite could possibly have condoned their activities.

It wasn’t the burglary that created watergate, but the attempted coverup. Likewise, it is not the third rate “science” at UEA that made climategate, but the attempted coverup by the “inquiries”.

As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.

I do not understand anything of the case Mr McIntyre has presented so ask that readers just accept that I accept it in its entirety.

But I am sorry I find indignation and disapproval expressed above by some bloggers somewhat disingenuous.

So the UEA crew cherry picked data and used inappropriate methods to make a case. But making the case was evidently what they were told to do, whether implicitly or explicitly, by the organizations in which they worked. Very possibly they made a substantial contribution towards the continuation of the organisation’s funding, thereby ensuring continuity of employment and ability to feed their families.

It seems to have been the same with the enquiry teams, Russell and Oxburgh: (1) They were themselves chosen by people who believed they would produce the required whitewash and duly came up with the goods, so improving their reputation for reliability and future employment prospects. (2) They may have taken the UEA crew’s duties to the university into consideration and felt it right to let them off.

And the polemicists, eg Bob Ward and Dr Pidgeon, do what they do.

All these people were merely doing their jobs – more or less well according to their abilities, the difficulties of the tasks and personal enthusiasm for the work.

Some elasticity in behaviour has been required, and, if my reading of some contributions to this thread is correct, deplored as personal failures. But the way people have behaved is the consequence of the institutional arrangements. What the Climategate episode, and for that matter the whole CAGW scam, reveals is a failure, not even of individual institutional arrangements, but of the way these the institutions have to work together. If blame has to be placed somewhere, I suppose it should be with Government.

I have no doubt that some who post to this blog will feel affronted by these views. I take their point – scientists have a duty to search for the truth, and that the UEA crew departed from that path in order to establish a particular truth and achieve some other end. But, in the absence of so much data, climate science is bound to be somewhat political, and the characters behaved in more or less the same way as politicians do, and nobody, I take it, would believe one of them without reservations. We live in a complicated world!

And might not many of the failures to provide data in response to FOI requests and the like have been because they simply lost it and when found, after searching through all sorts of discarded rubbish, they found that it was so in so much of a bxxxer’s muddle it could not be sent off, at least until a lot of cleaning up had been completed? Instances of sloppy work and archiving rather than deliberate obfuscation.

The attacks on the work must continue, but do try and lay off the people!

It always amazed me that the focus of climate science is on to the last 150 years out of 4.5 billion years.
This missed a great deal of evidence on how the atmosphere’s changed and the planet evolved. There are so many mistakes made that is is mind boggling.

Ecclesiastical Uncle:
“Very possibly they made a substantial contribution towards the continuation of the organisation’s funding, thereby ensuring continuity of employment and ability to feed their families.”

6 billion people manage to feed their families without resorting to falsifying scientific data. I’m sure they could have found some honest work to earn a living like most of the rest of us.
I just watched a documentary on the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960. One defense he offered at his trial was of only following orders. He was sentenced to death.

The entire CAGW edifice is designed to eliminate modern energy production and the benefits that brings. What I find incomprehensible is that so many people are willing, even eager, to stake our energy supply and our civilization on something as unpredictable as the weather!

Ecclesiastical Uncle, these individuals you defend as “only doing their jobs” have been quite willing to promote themselves and their falsehoods at the expense of real people. Because of this Mother of all Scams, real people have lost property, lives savings, and loved ones.

Some peripheral employees might have truly been “only doing their jobs,” but the core group (Hansen, Mann, Jones, Trenberth, etc.) were wretchedly lying, while lapping up taxpayers’ dollars on a large scale.

I resigned from a large national US bank because I didn’t like what they were doing. Individuals are NOT hostage to their employers. Even the “little guys” that are not directly involved in the wrong-doing, but are knowledgeable about it, have a moral responsibility.

What is far more interesting to me is this: With all the data that could be used (thanks to the revealing work at Climate Audit), combined with the penchant for meta-data re-hash so prevalent (and cheaper to do) in today’s research endeavors, why the deafening silence from other groups of climate researchers on this? Why hasn’t proxy and chronology experts chimed in with, “I don’t think so” submissions to the same journals Briffa can be found in? I find this silence compelling evidence for something much larger than “one tree grove” critiques. It is the back story, and the extent of that back story into the machinations of all climate research groups, that speaks volumes.

Could the back story be one of these?

1. We have a bunch of sissy climate capable researchers scared to disagree with each other.

2. We have a much larger bunch of researchers who have agreed to present a weak case purporting climate warming, or to stay silent when a weak one is presented, in order to save humanity from an unknown risk, or worse, in order to continue to grease the money machine.

3. Research in general has become lax in its response to minimally decent research because it is easier to do research at a lower standard.

The worst of it is, it could be all three, which is why it has become so difficult to turn this train away from the crumbling bridge ahead.

Astonished Priests, [noting that their sacred constructions, (although now entirely unsupported), remained visibly erect], immediately huddled together in concensus building thankfulness for that which must certainly disprove the Law of Gravity!

As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.

As the management of this blog will know, I had considerable difficulty in posting off my contribution and, in fact, sent off three versions, two of which have not appeared. (My internet connection has been very slow today.) In the last I altered ‘naïve’ to ‘disingenuous’. I also added the following paragraph:

And might not many of the failures to provide data in response to FOI requests and the like have been because they simply lost it? And because they eventually got round to looking for it amongst all sorts of discarded rubbish only to find it was in so much of a bxxxer’s muddle it could not be sent off, at least until it had been recreated or extensively cleaned up. Sloppy work and archiving rather than deliberate obfuscation?

Re: Verity Jones, April 10, 2011, 2:57 am

I agree that the devil was, indeed, in the detail and suppose that the fudges there got forgotten in the on-going work (and hubris) of creating the greater CAGW picture. There must have been moments when the chickens were coming home to roost when the UEA crew bewailed the fact that so much was being shown to hang on these trivialities.

Also, without surprise, I note the righteousness of Mr Jones’ indignation, which it seems is shared with many others. But nobody should be surprised to learn that I have difficulty in castigating the UEA crew as villains, worms, or whatever. They did what they did because of the institutional framework in which the Government had ensnared them. I expect all but a few of us here would have behaved in much the same way in the same circumstances. This is a somewhat uncomfortable realisation.

And as a purely practical matter, I doubt that those who voice righteous indignation will find themselves promoted to the rank of general in the CAGW war. Few friends will be made in the corridors of power by drawing attention to malfeasances that are the inevitable consequence of the institutional structures created there. And this war will be won by making friends and influencing people in these corridors.

Nevertheless, the steady pressure of a bunch of baying Rottweilers may help to force the required U-turn there in due course.

Re Richard S Courtney, April 10, 2011, 4:57 am

I am sorry q do not think I can agree with ‘Sorry, but No’. That seems to me to be plain wrong.

However, the Nuremberg trial comparison has made me think. What you are getting at is, I think, that, although only doing their job, the UEA crew were still acting improperly and have to be hauled over the coals. Mmm. They would defend themselves by claiming that they were only bending the truth a little and that such behaviour is commonplace amongst the politicians for whom they work. So, I suppose, if you shoot the crew, you shoot the lot. Well, now, that’s an idea …..

And ‘Why’ is not the question: more important is ‘How is such perfection to be achieved?’.

Very possibly they made a substantial contribution towards the continuation of the organisation’s funding, thereby ensuring continuity of employment and ability to feed their families.

The attacks on the work must continue, but do try and lay off the people!

It depends on the person. For example, suppose someone homeless stole some food to feed his family. He is still a thief, but you have sympathy for him. Now suppose a rich millionaire stole some food to feed his family. Would you still have sympathy for him? Taking that one step further, suppose that same millionaire stole the only meal from a poor person, would you have sympathy for him then?

In each example, each person did something wrong. But only in the first do you avoid attacking the person. This shows that you cannot make a blanket statement saying to not attack the person. It depends on the situation. The scientists and lead activists are usually already rich. They are stealing food out of mouths because their work has made energy prices increase and food prices increase. Meanwhile they, like a person without a conscience, continue to push the idea so that they can live a rich lifestyle.

Extending my example to the story at hand, the two researchers, Stepan and Rashit, who did the grunt work and get no thanks in return, I’m not willing to attack. The ones on top, the millionaires, I am. The ones at the top aren’t just trying to feed their family, they are fair game.

This is what drew me into the fray, if you will. I started reading about paleontology and the accompanying climate reconstructions about 1960 and have continued the interest through today, still subscribing to two archaeology magazines. Ten minutes into AIT, my wife brought it home, and I had not heard of it, my wife turned it off, being unable to bear my loud criticism of the truncated and invented data being displayed. Somehow I came upon CA and WUWT and found I wasn’t alone in my aversion to the nonsense being passed off as science. The light of day being shown on the criminal activity of the AGW Prop Team is invaluable. Thank you, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, and all who contribute in your venues.

With or without tree-ring data (throw it out – all of it!) and we still get the 20th century warming…i.e. the Hockey Stick shape. Despite the skeptical rhetoric that the entire hockey stick is based on carefully selected (or unselected tree-ring data), that simply is not the case.

The Arctic, which is long be held to be the first and most sensitive area that will display global warming, had been undergoing a cooling for many thousands of years (likely following more Milankovitch cycles that created the Holocene optimum), until the 20th century, when the sudden uptick in temperatures occurred…Yamal tree-ring data or not.

I do not understand anything of the case Mr McIntyre has presented so ask that readers just accept that I accept it in its entirety. But I am sorry I find the indignation expressed above by bloggers naive.

[emphasis mine]

With all due respect sir, and I mean that sincerely, it is incumbent on you to make the effort to understand the subject at issue before accusing anyone other than yourself of being disingenuous and naive.

Ecclesiastical Uncle at 10:12 pm on April 9, 2011
“If blame has to be placed somewhere, I suppose it should be with Government.”

Government is empowered by the people, not the other way around, and ‘responsibility’ is a better word than ‘blame’, so I therefore don’t agree with your conclusion.

You have described what has happened in these tainted establishments well, but it is not sustainable; eventually, even the grants and subsidies will run out. It is a dysfunctional bureaucratic world; not the real world of science and engineering or of the Arts, where our awareness of the here and now is heightened by clever contrasts of fantasy and reality, where the audience can see the distinction between the two and are not left in confusion. A well functioning bureaucracy wouldn’t do what you have described either!

I have just been listening to “The Unbelievable Truth” (Series 7, Episode 1) on BBC Radio 4 today, a vaguely funny panel game, where the chairman confirms whether the information read out by contestants is true or false.

The chairman, David Mitchell confirmed (at 3:50 into the BBC clip, if you in the UK) that Aristotle stated that flies have four legs and such was Aristotle’s standing, that, for over 1000 years, no one else bothered to count.

Isn’t this what science is all about? Each of us needs to take responsibility. Some may actually count the legs on a fly; others may offer these ‘fly leg counters’ support, finance, and advice, access to the public or open discussion.

What is shameful is that some people: (academics at the UEA and elsewhere), the media (policy makers and presenters in the BBC and elsewhere) and governments and their advisors (all of them?) have done the opposite, using public money, and have up to now, been supported by their organisations and resisted open discussion.

Scientists do search for the truth, led by the evidence, not an agenda to “achieve some other end”. If a scientist misleads himself or others, then the design of the next related experiment will be poorer; useless even! This is why so many scientists are angry at what has been happening within Climate ‘Science’.

In research, there may be confusion before the revelation, but there are not several “particular truths”. If there is a difference of opinion, it means a lack of understanding, so open discussion needs to be encouraged, not closed down in a nasty way, as has been happening. If the aim is not for better understanding, then it is to mislead, which can lead on to condoning malpractice and assisting fraudsters. It has already wasted public funds.

There is no “absence of data”, so there should be no reason for it to be ‘political’, rather than scientific. The data exists; it is just that it cannot be released without the truth being revealed.

“We live in a complicated world!”
We do, but the world is complicated enough without this sort of activity being condoned; one version of reality is enough.

“The attacks on the work must continue, but do try and lay off the people!”
Ad hominem attacks ARE discouraged; they are not effective and waste resources. However, an academic paper’s authors need to be called to account. They will have written a paper to change the world’s perception, so the world needs to be able to question their ideas and expects answers that move the discussion forward, without the need to issue FOIA requests. This is even more true when the conclusions support the spending of $250 billion, in Europe alone, in Climate Change policies.

I agree with Richard S Courtney at 4:57 am on April 10, 2011:
“Acting under orders is NOT – and must always be prevented from being – a valid defence for any nefarious activity. Google Nuremburg Trials if you want to know why.”
Though, I think that there is evidence that they have been cooperating as well.

“they thought up the absurd excuse that the MWP was only a regional phenomenon”

Global warming is a regional phenomenon, as it is mostly happening in the arctic.
_____
And in skeptic’s minds it is just purely a coincidence that the Arctic has long been shown in GCM’s to be the area of the planet that will warm first when the effects and feedbacks of the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700’s is taken into account, right?

See, the problem is, if you accept that the Arctic is warming, and is the warmest in at least 2,000 years, as shown in these completely independent non-tree ring related studies:

Then you’d have to find a mechanism to explain this warming. Search as you might (and climate scientists have searched and continue to search everyday), it’s tough to find one that doesn’t include the forcing (and related feedbacks) brought about by the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700’s.

R gates… rather myopic. Few argue an uptick in the 20th century. The tree rings, or other flawed proxies, are required to change the past to your liking, not the present. We have an actual temperature record for the present.

@ecclesiastical uncle
You need to consider the impact of the activist climate “scientists” on the poor. Not only the third world poor denied (in many cases) access to affordable and efficient energy but even the poor in developed countries. How many little old ladies froze to death in the UK in December 2010 because they were scared to run up their electricity bill even higher?

I’m sorry. There is no conceivable excuse for hyping up a warming of certainly less than the alleged 0.7 degrees in the C.20th into a potential “tipping point” catastrophe just to preserve their comfortable jobs and index-linked pensions.

The likes of Mann & Jones are just despicable.

If you want to explore the background to Yamal and all the rest, “The Hockey Stick Illusion” by Monfort is easy to follow and extremely well written.

It sounds as though the concepts of personal responsibility and individual integrity are entirely alien to you. But, in my experience, this is a common trait among “bureaucrats” (retired or otherwise).

I’m not a fan of ad hominem attacks. But, I absolutely believe in holding individuals accountable for their misdeeds.

The protests over Yamal are unfounded, and immaterial as far as the validity of the Stick graph is concerned.
The science of interpretation of tree rings requires a selection of trees which have rings which are temperature limited. Ignoring this scientific fact, as McIntyre has done, and picking trees at random is wrong.
Finally the Yamal chronology is not essential to show that global temperature is displaying a Hockey Stick.

I wonder if moderation rules here allow this kind of “argument” you used.

He’s not saying that, nor did I claim that he said that. However, he implied that the Yamal proxy data is a game-changer in the existing paleodata. Has anyone here bothered to compare reconstructions with and without those “suspicious” data?

Alarmist Myth (propagated by R. Gates, April 10, 2011 at 7:14 am):
“The Arctic… had been undergoing a cooling for many thousands of years…until the 20th century, when the sudden uptick in temperatures occurred…Yamal tree-ring data or not.”

Scientific Fact (substantiated by directly cited peer reviewed science):
Both the Arctic AND the Antarctic are experiencing an on-going, uninterrupted 10,000 year cooling trend wherein the latest warming is demonstrated to be not even close to being outside the bounds of natural variation.

What is far more interesting to me is this: With all the data that could be used (thanks to the revealing work at Climate Audit), combined with the penchant for meta-data re-hash so prevalent (and cheaper to do) in today’s research endeavors, why the deafening silence from other groups of climate researchers on this? Why hasn’t proxy and chronology experts chimed in with, “I don’t think so” submissions to the same journals Briffa can be found in? I find this silence compelling evidence for something much larger than “one tree grove” critiques. It is the back story, and the extent of that back story into the machinations of all climate research groups, that speaks volumes.

Could the back story be one of these?

1. We have a bunch of sissy climate capable researchers scared to disagree with each other.

2. We have a much larger bunch of researchers who have agreed to present a weak case purporting climate warming, or to stay silent when a weak one is presented, in order to save humanity from an unknown risk, or worse, in order to continue to grease the money machine.

3. Research in general has become lax in its response to minimally decent research because it is easier to do research at a lower standard.

The worst of it is, it could be all three, which is why it has become so difficult to turn this train away from the crumbling bridge ahead.

The real answer is that McIntyre’s work is wrong, and he doesn’t know what he is talking about. This is an alternative hypothesis that you don’t entertain at all. This does not seem very scientific to me.

McIntyre’s work has been found wanting by scientists in a number of areas. His claim that the Principal Components Method used by the original Mann et. al. Hockey Stick paper created the Hockey Stick, was definitively shown to be faulty because McIntyre used an incorrect selection criterion. When the analysis proposed by McIntyre was carried out correctly, the Hockey Stick created out of noise disappeared. He has no background in tree ring analysis, and is not really qualified to criticize what was done by Briffa.

REPLY: Mr Adler. If your “everybody but me is wrong” mindset leads you to think Mr. McIntyre is “wrong” and “doesn’t know what he is talking about” then please have the courage to post it on on his blog and let him respond. I have admin privileges there, so I can assure you your comment will get posted. Post it just like you did here.

Until you do, I won’t have you making the arguments here. I’d point out that you have no background in “anything” climate , so by your criteria, you aren’t qualified to comment here on anything. James Hansen had no background in anything climate when he started, Mike Mann had no background in anything climate, their degrees lie in other fields…thus, your argument is absolutely ridiculous.

Go take your argument to Mr. McIntyre. Do it now. We’ll all be watching. Here’s the URL

http://www.climateaudit.org Comment system works the same way, but there is no moderation unless you use banned words, too many links, or excessive bloviation all of which will trigger the spam filter.

Even if that happens, I guarantee your comment will be approved there, because I will go fish it out for you.

If you don’t wish to, then don’t make any more comments here about Mr. McIntyre. – Anthony Watts

R. Gates says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:14 am
“With or without tree-ring data (throw it out – all of it!) and we still get the 20th century warming…i.e. the Hockey Stick shape. Despite the skeptical rhetoric that the entire hockey stick is based on carefully selected (or unselected tree-ring data), that simply is not the case.”

You haven’t read Montford’s book about McIntyre’s criticisms. Tree rings were cherry picked to manufacture hockey sticks. As for the rest of your article, stop changing the subject.

Postscript to my previous comment…
In the following link, I directly address the alarmist hysteria about a highly cherry picked 2,000 year temperature record in the Arctic (cited by R. Gates, April 10, 2011 at 7:14 am).

As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
Re Gary Mount, April 10, 2011, 5:52 am

Sorry, I did not spot this post until after I had posted the previous one.

I am sorry I cannot grasp the significance of the world’s population as most, surely, will have no idea what science is. And we should have a free society without political correctness the like of which no doubt protected Adolf Eichmann from adverse comments about his activities that might perhaps have persuaded him to stop. Beware current political trends in the UK!

The question is how is the institutional situation to be arranged so that all those who work within it are free of the dilemma of whether to behave ethically or whether to do what their employer wants. Evidently, the answer is not obvious to government (or to me). And my experience teaches me that situations with these dilemmas are routine and that decision makers then go with their perception of the most pressing common good, more or less irrespective of other ethical considerations. Extra rendition, etc. Not nice.

In the climate change context, if we could free the Government of belief that CAGW is real, they could let the UEA do real science. But the belief is already there and the Government wants the UEA to bolster its case. We have to live with that situation and work from there.

Re Wade, April 10, 2011 at 7:04 am

Yes, obviously it depends on who they are. But I think the people I refer to are obvious from my first post. Also I see refraining from criticism as a tactical necessity.

Two yrs ago my two planted larches grew about 3.5 ft, but the late summer- fall period was very dry. Last season, despite sufficient spring – early summer rain, they grew only half as much (pretty much the same pattern for all my trees). The annual temp anomaly for both yrs was essentially the same — near average.

Tree-rings are not temp proxies — more like 1-yr lagged mid-to-late warm season precipitation proxies.

2) NASA has documented “around 100” glacial advances and glacial retreats over the last 2.5 million years (all of them in the Northern hemisphere).

3) Both the Arctic AND the Antarctic are experiencing an on-going, uninterrupted 10,000 year cooling trend wherein the latest warming is demonstrated to be not even close to being outside the bounds of natural variation.

I understand your opinion. People were doing their jobs within whatever social context existed.

Saying that the devil, a boss, or an organization made someone perform a dishonest, or illegal act may explain, but does not excuse individuals from taking responsibility for their own decisions. If Briffa was forced to deceive the world he can always make that claim, and accept the ensuing criticisms.

The situation boils down to a moment where men made real world choices. They made the choice to be dishonest and people who read this blog and most other blogs in the world understand that kind of situation. It is individuals that make these choices, not organizations.

Once Briffa and Jones made their choices, they had sold-out their honor and their colleagues. There was no return to the world of honorable men.

I apologise Mr. Gates however, making a post with links to the BBC and Wikipedia, IMO, does you no favours at all. In fact it is priceless! Can you provide real, unbiased, scientific links? I thought not!

The Team belongs behind bars. The most vexing thing is they and the institutions which employ them have gone completely unpunished. Perhaps civil suits could rectify this miscarriage of justice to some degree?

“The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional — the last period of similar magnitude occurred over 8,000 years ago. The Sun was at a similarly high level of magnetic activity for only ~10% of the past 11,400 years, and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.[27]”

“See, the problem is, if you accept that the Arctic is warming, and is the warmest in at least 2,000 years, as shown in these completely independent non-tree ring related studies:”

The problem with that is that Amundsen was able to navigate the Northwest passage circa 1900 and Greenland was warm enough for Vikings to raise cattle there beginning 1000 years ago which is something that hasn’t been practically possible there for the past 800 years.

Historical facts contradict what you’ve written, Gates. But hey, you aren’t the only warmist who refuses to let facts get in the way of your narrative accounts of the past.

R. Gates says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:34 am
See, the problem is, if you accept that the Arctic is warming, and is the warmest in at least 2,000 years, as shown in these completely independent non-tree ring related studies:
=======================================================
Ice Free North Pole At Peak Ice On March 17, 1959
Skate (SSN-578), surfaced at the North Pole, 17 March 1959

“McIntyre’s work is wrong, and he doesn’t know what he is talking about.”

Either eadler is either completely ignorant of the actual facts, or he is being typically disngenuous and mendacious. He should know that his propaganda only works with censorship, such as RealClimate routinely employs.

Adler continues: “The protests over Yamal are unfounded, and immaterial as far as the validity of the Stick graph is concerned.”

Adler lies again. The protests over Yamal are founded on Briffa’s carefully cherry-picked trees that produce a deliberately fabricated hockey stick shape. By removing just one single tree [YAD061], Briffa’s Hokey Stick completely disappears.

However, he implied that the Yamal proxy data is a game-changer in the existing paleodata.

It is. But that is not the point of Steve’s post.

Has anyone here bothered to compare reconstructions with and without those “suspicious” data?

Numerous times. Many, if not most, of us have been following the issue for several years. Clearly you did not read Steve’s post. Had you, you would have understood the significance of this proxy (as well as those nearby.) This is where you are being hypocritical by accusing people in here of not knowing the issue when you yourself do not.

Whoever had the decency to leak the Climategate emails, it would be great if he or she could let us have another batch to fill in a few gaps.

We need to put a wooden stake into the heart of the AGW cult – in any field of real science, the Team’s ‘research’ would have been ridiculed by their peers, resulting in its members becoming unemployable.

In their resume/CVs – putting “I was an expert in cherry picking and manipulating tree ring date – a dodgy concept at best – and deceived millions of people, thus becoming a hero to tax grabbing politicians”, is perhaps something they might wish to hide, just like they hid their data selection and manipulation procedures.

As a matter of routine, I confess I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate science, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.

Re Bob, April 10, 8.49am

I doubt there was a moment of choice. The situation crept up on them. It is sad for them now but I fear you are right and they will be for ever tarred by what they have done. Poor souls! Unless the CAGW crowd prevail, that is, in which case they may be heroes!

Re Dave Springer April 10, 2011, 8.56am

Gosh, putting them behind bars would raise the ante! Would that be wise? A civil action, now there’s a nice thought. Over to the lawyers!

And in skeptic’s minds it is just purely a coincidence that the Arctic has long been shown in GCM’s to be the area of the planet that will warm first when the effects and feedbacks of the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700′s is taken into account, right?

Oh, you seemed to be doing so well then you just happened to leave out one crucial point… GCMs expect BOTH poles to undergo the same warming. Left that out on purpose, didn’t you, because it defeats your argument, right? Polar amplification, not “north polar amplification.”

Btw, R. Gates, I thought you were 25% skeptic? Shouldn’t that “in skeptics minds” comment thus also apply to you? Or do you only apply that 25% to those regions that are conveniently overlapping with the other 75% of the nonsense you spew?

Wonderful question and wonderful post. The answer is simple and straightforward. The villain is PC – Political Correctness. Every day at the super-elite high school that my son attends, he learns that:

1. Al Gore is right.
2. Reverend Farrakhan is right – on any number of issues.
3. The head of Planned Parenthood is right.
n. And ad infinitum.

None of these matters may be debated; rather, doctrines must be memorized.

PC is a tool that has been around for quite a while, every since Alinsky invented it, and it is now the main tool of the ever more desperate communists who are struggling for power in the US. Semantic warfare is the main tool of the Left.

Just in case eadler can’t use the scroll bar to locate the inline comment above, I’m repeating this as a full comment so that he sees it.

Mr Adler. If your “everybody but me is wrong” mindset leads you to think Mr. McIntyre is “wrong” and “doesn’t know what he is talking about” then please have the courage to post it on on his blog and let him respond. I have admin privileges there, so I can assure you your comment will get posted. Post it just like you did here.

Until you do, I won’t have you making the arguments here. I’d point out that you have no background in “anything” climate , so by your criteria, you aren’t qualified to comment here on anything. James Hansen had no background in anything climate when he started, Mike Mann had no background in anything climate, their degrees lie in other fields…thus, your argument is absolutely ridiculous.

Go take your argument to Mr. McIntyre. Do it now. We’ll all be watching. Here’s the URL

http://www.climateaudit.org Comment system works the same way, but there is no moderation unless you use banned words, too many links, or excessive bloviation all of which will trigger the spam filter.

Even if that happens, I guarantee your comment will be approved there, because I will go fish it out for you.

If you don’t wish to, then don’t make any more comments here about Mr. McIntyre. – Anthony Watts

The entire “Progressive” ideology is PURE mythology! That is why it can ONLY survive in an absolute intellectual vacuum!

It doesn’t even survive there without an assumption of zero free-will (or equally, everyone has the same needs and wants and there is an even distribution of labor and resources capable of providing for both.) It IS an intellectual vacuum.

“Many here (myself included) have gone though their own process of transformation from ‘warmist’ to ‘sceptic’ as a result of self study (of ‘both sides’).”

I’ve always been a warmist insofar as acknowledging the physical properties of greenhouse gases and anthropogenic emission of said gases. Most every engineer at least from time to time has to refer to physical properties of materials. These generally aren’t theoretic properties but rather properties determined via experimental observation and/or practical application. CO2 works as an insulator in the atmosphere. It is transparent to visible light allowing sunlight to pass through unimpeded to heat the earth’s surface. It is translucent to far infrared light and impedes its progress from the earth’s surface to space. This has been well known for over 150 years when John Tyndall, one of the most prolific experimental physicists of his day, constructed ingenious (for the day) experimental apparatus to measure the physical properties of gases (among other things) in regard to far infrared light. He performed literally thousands of experiments with many different gases under varying conditions. His work remains unrefuted to this day with only refinements of the measurements with more modern laboratory apparatus. Anyone who disputes these well established facts is an illiterate when it comes to basic physical properties of gases.

That said, the bone of contention for me is so-called water vapor amplification. The story (and it IS just a story not an experimental observation or even theoretic construct) goes that the modest amount of warming that must come via the extra insulating gases added to the atmosphere by human activities creates a little extra water vapor (itself a greenhouse gas) which causes twice as much warming as the CO2 (and methane, which isn’t mentioned often enough). Well sir, if CO2 warming can produce some extra water vapor then water vapor warming must also produce even more water vapor which produces more warming. This is called a positive feedback which is something most every engineer has to deal and especially electronic engineers. Positive feedback is what makes a PA system start blaring out intense tones – your voice at the microphone is amplified by the PA then the amplified voice coming out of the PA speakers reaches the microphone and it gets amplified again and so on and so forth until the amplifier is driven into saturation. What would happen to the earth if the climate boffin’s imaginary water vapor amplification is true would be a runaway greenhouse where the water vapor (and surface temperature) would keep on rising until the atmosphere was completely saturated.

The earth has NEVER experienced a runaway greenhouse. The indisputable testimony of the geologic column reveals that CO2 level in the atmosphere has been as much as 10 times or more greater than today and global average temperature has never been more than 6-8 degrees celsius warmer. Indeed, when in the past CO2 levels have been far higher the biosphere was much more productive with the earth green from pole to pole. It was during just such episodes in the past which laid down the vast coal beds we are harvesting today. In fact these warm episodes are the norm, not the exception, in the earth’s history with them lasting for tens to hundreds of millions of years at a stretch with an occasional briefer ice age interrupting it. We live in one of those ice ages right this moment. The modern ice age has persisted for the past 3 million years and the only reason Washington, D.C. isn’t buried under a mile of ice is because once every 100,000 years the glaciers retreat back to the poles and stay there for about 10,000 years.

What actually happens is water vapor is a negative feedback not a positive one. In the surface temperature regime where water is liquid; evaporation, convection, and condensation (the water cycle) quickly move energy from the surface to thousands of feet up in the atmosphere where it can more easily escape to space. Not only that but the water cycle, which is running the fastest in the afternoon when the sun is the brightest, produces clouds which shadow the ground and reduces daytime surface heating. The clouds then give up the water as rain (afternoon thunderstorms) and dissipate by late evening allowing surface heat to more easily escape through the atmosphere. This effectively caps how warm the earth can get at this distance from the sun.

Where there is a frightening positive feedback is when the surface temperature falls below freezing allowing ice and snow to accumulate. The ice and snow reflect far more sunlight than open water or open land so surface heating by the sun is vastly reduced which in turn makes it even colder and more favorable for ice and snow to accumulate. The result of runaway cooling is an ice age. The average temperature of the global ocean is a mere 4c with only a shallow 300 meter surface layer ever getting warmer than 3C. That average ocean temperature (4C) is the average temperature of the surface taken over a complete glacial/interglacial cycle of 110,000 years. There is no other explanation for it. The average temperature of the ocean’s surface today is 16C. It won’t be that way for much longer. The interglacial period is already overdue for an abrubt ending and then the average surface temperature will fall to near or below freezing.

Global warming is a good thing. Some of the other indisputable properties of CO2 is that increased levels of it accelerate plant growth and at the same reduce the amount of water a plant needs per unit of growth. Global warming is also a misnomer because the warming effect of CO2 is muted by high humidity. Thus most of the warming occurs in higher latitudes during the winter where the air is dried by sub-freezing temperatures. In effect anthropogenic CO2 gives us longer growing seasons where we most need longer growing seasons, accelerates plant growth everywhere some other factor does not become limiting (sunlight, nutrients, water), and gives them increased drought resistance.

There really is no practical downside to anthropogenic CO2 that comes anywhere near outweighing the benefits. If there was no such thing as anthropogenic CO2 we’d need to invent it just to reap the positive benefits from it.

I fervently wish that one benefit of the anthropogenic global warming is an indefinite extension of the modern interglacial period. I don’t believe AGW is sufficient for that but I wish it were.

“Mr. McIntyre’s work deserves a Nobel Prize in Science and another in Letters. The world is greatly indebted to Mr. McIntyre.”

I couldn’t agree more Theo! Thank You, Mr. McIntyre!!!!
And Thank You Anthony, for keeping us informed of these excellent analyses!

Over the last few years, I have engaged in an informal dialog with a number of scientists and engineers at the large company I work for. Many were passive believers in AGW… and a few were rabid believers. The data and analyses Steve, Anthony, and soooo many others provide here are forwarded to these folks for their own evaluations. The data and analyses speak for themselves, bringing many to no longer be passive AGW believers but questioning scientists and skeptical engineers again.

I truly appreciate these reports and critical evaluations. They provide the ‘ammunition’ for guys like me to constructively refute false claims and illustrate the shoddy, if not fraudulent, manipulation of data done to create a predetermined AGW conclusion. The excellent analysis of Mr. McIntyre illustrates this in ‘spades’. It will get wide distribution through my informal network. Distilled to just the key points and with a link attached to this post, I’ll do my best to explain it to my State and Federal representatives or their key technical staffers.

Natural climate variation is far more controlling than any practical amount of AGW. Thus I’m forced to conclude that AGW will NOT prevent the return of the glaciers. The end of the Holocene interglacial period is both overdue and inevitable.

In the meantime would some kind CAGW boffin please wake me when apple orchards can be established again in Greenland. The vikings were growing apples 1000 years ago. For the past 800 years Greenland hasn’t had a long enough growing season for apples. Nor has it had a long enough growing season to produce silage for cattle. The vikings had that too. Until that becomes practical again the CAGW boffins should STFU and get off my ass.

“So the UEA crew cherry picked data and used inappropriate methods to make a case. By so doing they were evidently doing what they were told to do, whether implicitly or explicitly, by the organizations in which they worked. Very possibly they made a substantial contribution towards the continuation of the organisation’s funding, thereby ensuring continuity of employment and ability to feed their families.”

I couldn’t disagree with you more, EA! I suspect your parents would be deeply ashamed of your defense of personal and professional deceits, justified because they sustained paychecks and bureaucracies! This form of ‘relativism’ is part of the moral and ethical sickness pervading our culture today. Where lies honesty, integrity, and self respect, in your defense of such personal, professional, and institutional deceits? Nowhere to be found……..

On several occasions, I have put my employment ‘on the line’ by refusing to be a part of just such deceits. The people that suggested these deceits sounded just like you! My self respect would not (and will not) allow me to be a knowing accomplice to what I knew to be fraud… and I told them so. On one occasion, I was asked “What if we didn’t give you a choice?”, to which I replied “I always have a choice!”

We always have a choice. We can be honest and ethical or we can be deceitful cheats. You choose – I’ve already made mine.

rbateman says:
April 9, 2011 at 8:10 pm
“If you had to think up a viral plan to take down Western Civilization by planting an idea, the AGW conundrum would be hard to beat. They took too long. Natural Climate cycles kicked the Earth into reverse, and the emperor’s clothes did the rest.”

I wish that were entirely true. From where I stand it seems to me that the laymen, and it is the laymen that must be convinced in any political argument, very predominantly continue to “see” the emperors clothes. They ignore the small boy crying “the emperor has no clothes”.

Thanks for taking the time to boil your understanding into something that us high school drop-outs could understand. With your permission, I’d like to copy and paste your post to my Facebook notes (with proper attribution of course) so that all of my friends can read it also. I found it authoritative and comprehensible and I’m sure others would too. It deserves to be spread & read widely.

“See, the problem is, if you accept that the Arctic is warming, and is the warmest in at least 2,000 years, as shown in these completely independent non-tree ring related studies: (and you link BBC news story and USA Today story)

Then you’d have to find a mechanism to explain this warming. Search as you might (and climate scientists have searched and continue to search everyday), it’s tough to find one that doesn’t include the forcing (and related feedbacks) brought about by the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700′s.”

R. Gates, if you could be convinced that the MWP did exist, then you would have to drop your warmest Arctic in 2000 years, then you would have to rethink the magnitude of the additional CO2’s effects. Farmsteads emerging from melting ice in Greenland needs only a thinking mind with no studies to concluded that there was a MWP. A host of other studies and observations also support this. An important point of the Yamal and other dendro work was that it did discover the MWP and this dreaded finding had to be gotten rid of by eliminating most of the tree cores across the region. We also had grapes growing in Scotland, and other historic evidence. Even newspaper reports of the plight of seals in the Arctic during the 1930’s warming period which has also been the subject of much “correction and homogenization” to try to make it cooler than today – it was hotter until a series of recent alterations made by Hansen’s assistants.

Finally, everytime someone speaks about the giant 40% increase in CO2 (and you can be sure from the elasticity of data in the hands of CAGW folks that 40% is the maximum they figured they could get away with) since the 1700s, they don’t bother state that we are talking about 380ppm of CO2. Imagine if there was one molecule of CO2 in the atmosphere and it tripled what hysteria it would generate. Now Mr. Gates, I judge you to be an intelligent and honest (if a little too accepting) person. You can see that the MWP is the killer. One would have to explain how we had a comparably warm period 1000 years ago that dipped down to the depths of the LIA with apparently no significant change in CO2.

And when you say: yeah whatever, about the tree ring circus and jump to the other hockey sticks, you are avoiding wondering why these guys (the tree ring circus includes almost all the personalities that came up with other hockey sticks) felt the need to cook the tree data at all. Are you saying this cooking is okay because they already had another way to make the hockeystick? If you are going to throw out data that doesn’t give you a hockey stick and it takes re-re-correcting 1930s data in the 1990s-2000 to push this part of the curve down to give you the blade (it probably was more like a scythe than a hockey stick in reality and we are just now getting the blade) and this is all okay with you, I will have to re-evaluate my opinion of you. If you are scandalized by this trickery, then we should be welcoming you over to the other side – after Phil Jones himself has switched.

Alexandre says:
April 10, 2011 at 11:35 am
BTW, the recent warming is vastly documented by instrumental data, so there is no need of the Yamal data to show this warming at all (need reference here?).
=====================================================
Alexandre, I agree
it’s not the trees, it’s not the ice, it’s not even the rocks…

“the recent warming is vastly documented by instrumental data”
…after the adjustments, when you admit to UHI and adjust up for it….

Another great empirical observation that doesn’t get mentioned enough is how cold the earth would be sans water and atmosphere. If you dig down into dry ground a meter or so where you live you’ll find a point where the temperature is constant all year long. That is the average temperature for your latitude. The same thing can be done on the earth’s moon. In fact it has been done on the earth’s moon. Twice. The data is public. Two Apollo science packages were temperature probes into the regolith with sensors at various depths. They both transmitted data for a number of years. At an earth latitude where the constant ground temperature is 16C the corresponding latitudes on the moon were -23C.

The earth and moon are made of the same basic rocks (which is also experimental fact) in the upper crust (identical albedos) and are at the same distance from the sun. So without air or water our rock would be -23C. No real question of that.

SOMETHING is making the earth’s surface 39C warmer and it must be either or both of the fact there is an atmosphere and global ocean.

The biggest warmer-upper is the mere fact that liquid water is 16% darker than rocks so with the earth 71% covered with liquid water it absorbs about 10% more energy than the moon which accounts for about half of the 39C we need to account for bring the earth’s average temperature up to a few degrees C below freezing. Because of the positive feedback from snow/ice high albedo we’d be a giant snowball absorbing far less energy than the moon if the ocean were frozen.

This is where the atmospheric greenhouse comes in. Primarily it’s water vapor which is around 4% absolute relative humidity on average across the globe. Depending on who you ask it might be as little as 70% of the greenhouse effect to as much as 95%. Average global humidity is not known with enough precision to narrow down the range above. In any case it’s sufficient to raise the global average temperature from below freezing to above freezing and give us a better shot of having a persistent liquid ocean instead of a persistant frozen ocean.

But clearly that isn’t always enough surface warming to keep the ocean liquid. Ice ages indisputably are real, last for millions of years, and sometimes (somewhat controversially) freeze the entire planet from pole to pole.

So a liquid water world at our distance from the sun would be a frozen world. Something else must contribute to the dominance of liquid ocean vs. frozen ocean over the past billion years or so. Again controversially CO2 is what eventually brings the earth out of being largely or completely covered in snow and ice. There would be little life left on the earth if most of it is frozen and ice doesn’t absorb atmospheric CO2. When the earth is frozen the carbon and water cycles just about completely shut down. A frozen ocean can’t absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and green plants won’t be growing on frozen ground and carbonates won’t be forming from chemical processes either.

Volcanism now comes to the rescue. Even on a frozen earth volcanoes won’t stop belching out CO2. With no functioning carbon sinks it will build up and up and up until the greenhouse effect from it starts melting more and more ice which lowers albedo in a positive feedback situation the earth is a water world again, life flourishes again, the carbon cycle spins back up in overdrive, and the high atmospheric CO2 content keeps it a water world for tens to hundreds of millions of years until some perfect storm comes along to start a new ice age.

We need at least all the extra CO2 we can produce with fossil fuel combustion. Clearly the present concentration is periously low which handily explains why the earth has been in an ice for the past 3 million years. We clearly DO NOT want advancing glaciers and increasing polar sea ice. That’s a dangerous downward spiral to a frozen world.

Simply clicking on the ‘no-dendro’ reconstruction links that you provide shows that each of these begins in 1400 or 1500. The value of dendro to the required narrative (if not to truth) is that it supports the notion that the current warmth is anomalous on the thousand year time scale.

Similarly the pnas tortured no-dendro link, shows not a hockey stick but a v-shaped graph.

Anyway, I take it that you accept that all dendro derived temperature records should be stricken from the scientific record. On that, I think that you will find broad agreement.

See, the modern temperature record MUST be seamlessly linked into the tree-ring record, or Mann-made global warming cannot exist.

But it cannot be. When modern tree-ring = temperature records are extended past
1960 (when CO2 can be shown to be to begin increasing from an assumed constant level) then tree-ring temperature begin DECLINING. (Not increasing, as it is known temperatures have increased.)

Thus tree-ring climatology is proved false in all their glorious assumptions – IF (big IF there!) – tree rings are only proportional to temperature, water, soil, and local conditions like fires. But since tree-ring thickness IS proportional to more than that – to CO2 levels as well for example, which Mann does NOT correct for – then temperature cannot be extrapolated from tree ring thickness measurements.

But Mann is too busy getting 93 million dollar grants for Penn State, and Nobel Prizes for his Al Gore and the IPCC funding it involves – to worry about the accuracy of his “science.” Which has never been established.

Yet another inconvenient fact for the CAGW boffins is that a mere change in axial tilt of a few degrees aligning with a one percent change in orbital eccentricity is enough to tip the balance between interglacial and glacial periods. Axial tilt and eccentricity don’t change how much energy the earth receives during a year. It merely changes the distribution of it temporally between seasons and spatially across the surface.

We’re at a tipping point! But it isn’t a tipping point to a modestly warmer non-ice age era but rather it’s a tipping point out of the interglacial period and back to glaciers ruling the planet for 100,000 years. That’s the science speaking and it speaks quite clearly. When it says something else science has left the building and political agenda has taken its place.

Climate Change in Eurasian Arctic Shelf Seas
“Many studies and international projects, such as the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), attribute the air temperature increase during the last quarter of the 20th century exclusively to accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However these studies typically do not account for natural hydrometeorological fluctuations whose effects on multiyear variability, as this monograph shows, can far exceed the anthropogenic impact on climate.”Book

Alexandre: I am a high school drop-out so your pedantic, reference-spew is quite literally wasted on me. As one of the great un-washed however, it gives me great pleasure to tell you, someone who’s parents obviously wasted a lot of money on a post-secondary education, that no one here disputes “the warming”. Warming is what things do when they begin to thaw. My 6 year-old grand-son gets that. What is at issue is “what is causing” the warming. According to you it is caused by my 6.6 liter Duramax idling 12 hours a day (just trying to do my part) which is nonsense. Instead of providing links to data which proves the self-evident, how about showing us the proof that CO2 is causing “the warming”?

Ok, if this is thecase, this topic is closed, right? What’s all the fuss about the Yamal data?

And bear in mind that those exclude all the dendro data, not just Yamal.

Now about the instrumental record: I have no idea what’s the problem with the data in Chandler, Arizona. But the world temperature anomalies are much more comprehensive than that. And if you don’t trust the data treatment, try doing it yourself. Unless you’re a scientist (not my case), your results certainly would need some rework before they went published in Nature, but for the purposes of a blog discussion or check-it-yourself verification, you’d find very similar results to the ones NASA, NOAA, CRU or JMA have found.

Here’s one available dataset, at the NOAA website. Feel free to look for others of your preference.

No one has shown any problem with these independently calculated series. Not even the highly publicized project of Watts (data venia) has yielded any different series than the known ones.

And of course, there are retreating glaciers, shifting biological occurrences, raising tropopause… all pointing to the existing warming. One has to overblow a very very farfetched conspiracy theory to put together all these “fake” results.

“The Principle of Replication
states that the environmental signal being investigated can be maximized, and the amount of “noise” minimized, by sampling more than one stem radius per tree, and more than one tree per site. Obtaining more than one increment core per tree reduces the amount of “intra-tree variability”, in other words, the amount of non-desirable environmental signal peculiar to only tree. Obtaining numerous trees from one site, and perhaps several sites in a region, ensures that the amount of “noise” (environmental factors not being studied, such as air pollution) is minimized. ”http://sonic.net/bristlecone/principles.html

So, essentially, just more evidence of the smoochy schtick team either was lying or just being incompetent.

I thought it was fairly obvious when they used a handful of trees from a, rather very much the, local area to represent global climate at the same time trying to make belief MWP into a non global phenomenon because it was “only” a northern hemisphere “statistical curse”. :p

with regard to US tree rings and the reason for the decline, as in ‘hide the decline’, may I direct you to this:-

“Abstract Invasions of European earthworms into the forests of northern North America are causing dramatic changes in forest floor structure, vegetation communities, biogeochemical cycling, and site hydrology. However, long-term studies on the effects of invasive earthworms are limited because little data exist on the timing and rate of earthworm invasion at specific sites. We successfully used tree rings to identify the timing of earthworm invasions and the effects of earthworm activity on the Acer saccharum”

“The tree-ring signature of earthworm invasion, as identified in this study, includes three components:
(1) a period of 20–30 years of reduced radial growth rates in trees growing in newly invaded areas relative to trees growing in the same stand but in earthworm free conditions;
(2) a subsequent period of increased growth by the trees in the earthworm-invaded areas relative to trees in the same stand growing in earthworm-free conditions;”http://www.forestry.umn.edu/prod/groups/cfans/@pub/@cfans/@forestry/documents/asset/cfans_asset_249366.pdf

Find an active or retired forester in the region. Ask them about the trees, the tree-rings, and the climate. Some of these guys are 100 years old, sharp as a tack, and are working the same area that ggggrandpa worked 500 years ago. They will explain much about the trees, the tree rings, and the environmental conditions that produced them. (Of course, Warmista will be challenged by the part about explanation.)

Ecclesiastical Uncle says:
April 9, 2011 at 10:12 pm
“All these people were merely doing their jobs – more or less well according to their abilities, the difficulties of the tasks and personal enthusiasm for the work.”

That’s true. You should google “Eichmann” to find out more about people doing their job.

As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.

Re perilousfight April 10, 2011, 6.45am

This was hardly the Mother of all Scams. Rather it was a wretched little one that grew like Topsy! But I agree that it is a sad but true thing that so many of us are and will be poorer as a result, and that tax payers money is and will be wasted. But that’s hardly unique with governments. (And how does the CAGW mistake rank with other government cxxx-ups? One for the GWPF perhaps?)

Your resignation from your bank was clearly over a matter of principle. By contrast, the UEA crew, and probably others, do not seem yet to have been brought to see that any such issue exists for them.

Re TrueNorthist April 10, 2011, 2.03am

You’d better believe me –I do not understand anything! Of the detail, that is. And yes, I did have a superficial go at understanding, but found myself going glassy eyed. Since a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I have thought it wise to claim none.
And thank you for the salutation!

Re Robert Christopher April 10, 2011 7.26am

Thank you for your comments.

It is not my place to condone what has happened. Also, I doubt condemnation will achieve anything, so I do neither. In fact, I concur with the spirit of your dissertation while wishing that it was more purposeful in the context of the current CAGW war. In this, it will be best to face the reality that is, and that is what I have tried to promote in these posts.

Re martin brumby April 10, 2011 7.46am

I do not neglect the world’s poor as you said, and in fact feel it keenly because it causes an unnecessary threat to peace and stability. And I have spent most of my working life in a related field. However, I disagree that there is no conceivable excuse for the hockey team to do what they did. Plainly, they did it because they were under pressure to do so from an imperfect system. You have a right to think that inadequate. However, I doubt that, until recently, they ever felt it appropriate to examine the actions they took at the time and am not prepared to be so censorious. Ideally, Government should make the system work better or improve it. But I have no ideas on how this can be accomplished, I fear.

Sniping away at the team may create a feeling of weakness amongst the inhabitants of the corridors of power and this may help when someone, making friends and influencing people, sets about getting policies changed in a way climate skeptics would approve of. On the other hand, it may cause them to close ranks and refuse to negotiate. There has unfortunately been a sign, I think, that this is happening.

I have read the Bishop’s book. Investigative reporting!

Re SBVOR April 10 2011 7.50am

No, personal responsibility and integrity are obviously essential in a bureacrat’s career and are not alien to me. But, to parody Newton, for every government policy there is an equal and opposite government policy, and bureacratic actions are often about identifying the balance point between the opposing forces. So compromises abound and there is often, as in funding climate science, no indisputably right course.

I do not think you have valid reason to think I am alien in the way you say – a careful perusal of my admittedly intractable prose should not lead to that conclusion.

And thank you for the pointers to costs. (And see re perilusfight above.)

Re Mac the Knife April 10, 2011 10.45am.

I do not really understand your comments. If you disagree, have I got my facts about the goings-on at the UEA and elsewhere wrong? No one else has suggested so. And I offer no defense, only a probable explanation of how and why the events in question came to happen. The rest of what I have to say about your suppositions about my parents’ opinions of my descriptions of official behaviour would be repetition so see re martin brumby above.

On the whole I do not think I agree with the sentiments behind your questions about the state of modern society, although I think the trends are negative.

I note your refusal to be part of similar deceipts and find, when I think a little about it, at least one equivalent episode in my career. But my feeling is that it is not reasonable to expect that sort of conduct from everyone given the difficulties I experienced at the time of the episode. Gosh!

Dave Springer says:
April 10, 2011 at 12:13 pm
“SOMETHING is making the earth’s surface 39C warmer and it must be either or both of the fact there is an atmosphere and global ocean.
[…]
This is where the atmospheric greenhouse comes in.”

R. Gates says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:34 am
“Then you’d have to find a mechanism to explain this warming. Search as you might (and climate scientists have searched and continue to search everyday), it’s tough to find one that doesn’t include the forcing (and related feedbacks) brought about by the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700′s.”

” I am not an expert in the subject but it would appear that the NOAA and Mouna Lua data sets are highly reliable. I then began a long but ultimately rewarding study: recognizing the stochastic nature of the time series (I(1) and I(2) respectively) I faced I attempted both first and second order regressions looking for what I presumed would be a high degree of sensitivity of temperature to changes in CO2 concentration.

The answer is there is none. I have followed it up up by lagged studies – there is no relationship. So I scoured the climate science literature to find an experimental design or some satisfactory explanation for this lack of association. There is plenty of
reference to the high correlation between temperature and CO2 but that is not good enough. There is a high correlation between temperature and the salaries of first division footballers. It means nothing – it would only mean something if
variation in temperature could be shown to be positively correlated with changes in footballers salaries. They cannot.
The climate science literature is silent on this problem.”

“Here’s one available dataset, at the NOAA website. Feel free to look for others of your preference.

No one has shown any problem with these independently calculated series.”

Just because so-called “Journalists” have deliberately hidden the evidence does not mean the evidence does not exist. The fact is that all the land based temperature datasets have been demonstrated (via peer reviewed science) to contain about a 30% warming bias:

R. Gates says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:34 am
…………………………………….
And in skeptic’s minds it is just purely a coincidence that the Arctic has long been shown in GCM’s to be the area of the planet that will warm first when the effects and feedbacks of the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700′s is taken into account, right?

It’s ok not to understand scientific papers. My law degree does not allow me to go much further than yourself, I suppose.

But the Yamal issue here is about denying the warming. It is said that the Yamal data, which is supposedly flawed, is all that produced the (again supposedly) false warming. Look at these graphs: the first is a hockey stick, the second is the “real” temperature when you exclude Yamal data.

So, if you are ok with “the warming”, then the Yamal issue at hand can be dismissed.

“R. Gates says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:34 am
…………………………………….
And in skeptic’s minds it is just purely a coincidence that the Arctic has long been shown in GCM’s to be the area of the planet that will warm first when the effects and feedbacks of the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700′s is taken into account, right?”

And, within the CAGW totalitarian political religious cult, it is PURELY a coincidence that perfectly natural Milankovitch Cycles have EXACTLY the same effect?

R. Gates says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:34 am
“And in skeptic’s minds it is just purely a coincidence that the Arctic has long been shown in GCM’s to be the area of the planet that will warm first when the effects and feedbacks of the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700′s is taken into account, right?”

Do you not understand what physical hypotheses are? Climate scientists of any and all stripes have no set of physical hypotheses that can be used to explain or predict temperatures in the Arctic. No physical hypotheses means no science. It means guesswork along the lines of Ptolemy’s indefinitely large number of epicycles that he thought he could use to explain and predict the observed paths of the planets. If you think I am wrong, you have one very simple way to prove it: produce the physical hypotheses. You cannot do it, nor can any climate scientist, for the simple reason that they do not exist. Climate science is in its infancy. At this time, all climate scientists should be discussing how best to gather data that can be used to test actual physical hypotheses in forty or fifty years.

Wow…hey big Al, methinks you doth need to chill a little. Just out of curiosity: did you even read the CA post in its entirety?

It seems that you and all the other posters in the leaking dingy (pun intended) of said, “…the recent warming is vastly documented by instrumental data, so there is no need of the Yamal data to show this warming at all (need reference here?)…” have missed the point, the goal, schucks bukeroo you’re not even in the stadium! :-0

You and your ilk are / have made denegrating comments concerning SM’s excellent work; it makes you sound pedantic while at the same time confirming the old Sam Clemens line that ends with, “…opening your mouth and proving them true”

Go back, do your due-diligence, and then come back and make a contribution to the discussion that is on-point…THANK YOU.

I did not say: “Steve said all reconstructions include Yamal tree rings”, which is what you are complaining about.

Never said you did that, either. However, this is a post by Steve (prefaced by Anthony) in which you are accusing us of not understanding this simple point. Had you actually read Steve’s post (I did,) you would have seen that he does not make any such claim nor is such a claim implied, which tends to imply nobody here is under that misconception (you are the only one that has not read his post apparently,) which begs the question, why make the statement “Not all paleoclimate reconstruction[s] include Yamal tree rings”? Nobody here thinks this is the problem.

About the importance of Yamal data in reconstructions:

When you have actually read Steve’s post, then maybe you will get a little respect in this regard, but clearly you do not understand the point of Steve’s post.

BTW, the recent warming is vastly documented by instrumental data, so there is no need of the Yamal data to show this warming at all (need reference here?).

Who cares? When have I said anything in disagreement with recent warming? If you had read Steve’s post, you would understand that this has nothing to do with that. I’ve already noted once that we have a temperature record for that, can you not read? I’d suggest a trip to fallacyfiles.org to investigate the terms red herring or straw man. Your use of them suggests ignorance of both.

Similarly, your links to the other reconstructions are pointless and do not address anything related to Yamal. I should point out, btw, that M08 does indeed use Yamal for the 1000 year reconstruction. The others only go back about 500 years, which again misses the point of Yamal, and certainly misses the significance of Steve’s post.

But you’d better stick to the lying/hypocrite/general ad hominem reasoning. It’s more promising to your case.

Nothing I have said comes close to an ad hominem. While you are over at fallacyfiles, why not look up that term as well? As for your hypocrisy, you still have not read Steve’s post and yet you are still accusing us of ignorance. Sorry, hypocrite, but that’s what you are. And, your follow-up to the original post is still, IMO, a plain lie.

Something I’ve yet to see addressed among all the dendroclimatology business is this:

The tree rings relevant to the studies were correlated against June, July and August land temperature records (see Tim Osborn’s email of 28th April 2006 “684. 1146252894.txt”). Thing is, nearly all of the posited warming in the temperature record in this part of the world comes in the winter months, when there’s no tree ring growth to correlate against.

So where’s the real value in this field of study in assigning CO2 a leading role in raising global temperatures to scarily high levels?

The divergence between tree rings and temperature in recent decades has been discussed in published literature for quite a while, now.

Sooo… how does this help? The mere fact that it has been “discussed” does not yet change the fact that calls into question the use of tree rings, particularly those that are suffering from so-called divergence, as proxies for temperatures.

I love how you defenders of the faith think merely discussing this problem makes it go away. You understand so little of the statistical implications you are willing to simply buy into myth after myth in defense of your pet theory.

Readers, I urge you to read and digest this story, because it forms the seminal basis for everything that is wrong with Team paleoclimate science:…

Amen. Anecdotally, after reading Jeff Id’s description of Climate Science’s statistical methodology in handling tree ring proxies, at the same time when Steve M. was analyzing Briffa’s Yamal “materials and methods”, it was apparent that “it could all come down to one tree!” – which I also rather sarcastically posted somewhere around here right when Steve found out about YAD061, at which point my mind blew up good, real good!

From there it only gets worse. And since CO2=CAGW Climate Science is really only a massive Propaganda Op., it will keep getting worse until it is rightfully crushed.

IMO (which probably counts for less here than it does in my own house) the assertion of rising temperatures in this century is irrelevant. The point is that the MWP was disappeared from the paleoclimate record through the shenanegans of these yahoo’s fiddling with the Yamal and Polar Urals data sets (as SM’s post clearly shows). see below for the time frame in question:

Maybe you recall climategate email 1136918726.txt :

“Keith,

Thanx for this. Interesting. However, I do not think your response is very good. Further, there are grammatical and text errors, and (shocking!!) you have spelled McKitrick wrong. This is a sure way to piss them off.

They claim that three cores do not cross-date for TRW. They also say (without results) that the same applies to MXD (these results may be in their Supp. Mat. — I presume you checked this).

So, all you need say is …

(1) TRW was not the only data used for cross-dating.
(2) When MXD is used there are clear t-value peaks, contrary to their claim. You can show your Fig. 4 to prove this.
(3) The 3-core-composite cross-dates with other (well-dated) chronologies (Yamal and Polurula), confirming the MXD-based dating. You can show your Fig. 5 to prove this.

You could say all this in very few words — not many more than I have used above. As it is, your verbosity will leave any reader lost.

There are some problems still. I note that 1032 is not cold in Yamal. Seems odd. Is it cold in *all* of the three chronologies at issue? Or did a reindeer crap next to one of the trees?

Also, there seems to be a one-year offset in the 1020s in your Fig. 6.

I hope this is useful. I really think you have to do (and can do) a better job in combatting the two Ms. If this stuff gets into Nature, you still have a chance to improve it. Personally, I think it would be good for it to appear since, with an improved response, you can make MM look like ignorant idiots.

Tom”

See guys, nobody is talking about any CURRENT rise in temps (except you, and currently it’s flat with a slight hint of a decline), no one is arguing about it. The issue is around the year 1000, or so (see above) again.

SM does excellent work at ferreting out the truth, and I agree 100% with Anthony when he comments at CA, ” A working title might be: A forensic paleoclimatological investigation into goodness of fit of reindeer crap enhanced tree ring series with CRUTEM3 surface data.” He (SM) unlike many others, is doing a very meticulous deconstruction of how this got started technically.

In closing I want to add that I stand opposed to likening these guys (Jones, Mann, Briffa, et al) to Nazis, ok? Unwarrented IMO, HOWEVER, I also stand opposed to those who liken them to just a bunch of taxpayer funded scientists doing what they were told by their boss, or the gub’ment. We belong to governments and define them, just like we belong to clubs and also define them as well. Corruption occurs through and is promulgated by INDIVIDUALS. Those practicing, corrupt individuals have then corrupted their clubs / gub’ments. It’s not the other way ’round.

You are about 9 months too early. Climate “science” doesn’t yet exist! Climate “science” would be a testable set of hypothesis, the application of scientific methodology and a scientific ethic – none of this exists in this subject.

Infancy? Think for of someone just waking up with a hangover to discover they are in a bed with some jerk and they are just trying to remember through the fuzz where they could buy the morning after pill!

“So, if you are ok with “the warming”, then the Yamal issue at hand can be dismissed.”

Dude, I am totally “ok with the warming”, as is anyone who realizes two things:

1) it is due to natural processes; and
2) it’s a hell of a lot better than “the cooling”.

It’s hard to believe that someone with a law degree would be so easily conned and intractable when faced with such overwhelming contrary evidence. Thinking about it though, many politicians are lawyers so I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised.

1) No, the peer reviewed science says that about 30% of the warming indicated by the land based datasets appears to be erroneous. And, this seriously calls into question every over the top phony allegation made by the CAGW cult about recent temperatures:

There is NO ONE who “denies the warming” posting on this site that I have ever seen. On this, inter-alia, you are completely and totally wrong. A bigger man would admit his mistake and become a contributing member of the board. We all value rational debate. Your constant insinuation that we are all “warming deniers” is nonsense. If you can’t debate on our level then go elsewhere.

Good decision to leave this up as a headliner Anthony. It deserves as much exposure as possible.

This just keeping looking worse. These ‘snips’ masquerading as ‘scientists’ and their enablers have done too much damage to the credibility of real science already, and it looks like this cess pool is very, very deep.

What makes all this doubly absurd is that there STILL has been ABSOLUTELY NO demonstration that trees are “thermometers,” in ANY sense, One would think that by now the “paleodendroclimatologistst&statisticalprognocologistics” would be able to demonstrate this basic relationship. But NO, NO, they will not even deign to address this issue in the secular literature (favorite ploy of leftists everywhere–ignore the facts). Consequently, by default (as well as by all other measures) ALL of their “science” is JUNK, by the most basic of definitions of junk. I’m still amazed that there are so many folks that would defend this scatology!

As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.

Re DirkH April 10 2011 2.41pm

Others (Gary Mount April 10 2011 5.52am and Richard S Courtney April19 2011 4.57am) have pointed out that following orders was not an adequate defense for Eichmann and at the Nuremberg trials. Of course.

So yes, it seems to me that, in this as in so many other things, we do not have the luxury of an infallible rule, but are forced into making decisions.

In my original post, I merely reported what happened as I see it. Evidently, those involved never faced the issue that following instructions might not be held to be right by some, at least originally. Am I correct to observe that government would say it was right in the current situation, even if they were mindful of Eichmann and Nuremberg, and that uninvolved scientific purists (no criticism implied) would say No?

jae says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:08 pm
“What makes all this doubly absurd is that there STILL has been ABSOLUTELY NO demonstration that trees are “thermometers,” in ANY sense.”

Amen, Brother. I was reading a recent “Science” magazine article about the effects of climate on evolution over the past X number of years. They had taken a few hundred tree ring samples from an area about the size of Texas and were describing climate changes over thousands of years. Utter and total fantasy beyond all scientific control. What trash “Science” has become.

Maybe the Team might want to play with this tree ring data… or maybe not.

“North Dakota does not not have any long-lived trees but Pinus ponderosa and Juniperus scopulorum in the North Dakota badlands have records that extend back to about AD 1600 (29). Instrumental records for climate change in North Dakota are about 100 years old. Comparison of the tree ring records with the instrumental climate records, indicates that the tree ring record is sensitive to drought. All the trees have thinner rings during the drought of the 1930’s. Individual records show a lot of variation, but there appears to be a cyclicity to drought, with intense droughts occurring on a frequency of 40 – 60 years.”

Re: “There is NO ONE who “denies the warming” posting on this site that I have ever seen.”

That may be true. However, I think that many “deny” the official AMOUNT of warming (0,7 degrees centigrade) during the last century. The instrumental data suffers many flaws:

1. Thousands of thermometers have been moved or discontinued.
2. Thermometers are concentrated asymmetrically around the world.
3. Almost all adjustments to the database have increased the warming trend.
4. UHI is poorly, or not accounted for, depending on who does the analysis.
5. Original data has been “lost”.
6. Thermometers are often poorly sited – near heat sources.
7. Different technologies have been used over time.

It is therefore reasonable to argue that instrumental data provides inconclusive evidence for unprecedented global warming. If recent warming is not unprecedented, it must be a natural phenomenon.

To me, the idea that tree rings could possibly be used as any sort of serious temperature proxy is so patently absurd on its face that any discussion beyond that is academic in the extreme. Come one! How many other factors are at play? Sunlight, water, nutrients (aka “reindeer crap”) — just to name a few.

The fact that their own data invalidated their own temperature proxy is just icing on the cake. The cherry picking of which tree best fit the desired outcome simply takes us into the realm of The Twilight Zone (or, perhaps, The Sopranos).

Ecclesiastical Uncle says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:31 pm
“In my original post, I merely reported what happened as I see it. Evidently, those involved never faced the issue that following instructions might not be held to be right by some, at least originally. Am I correct to observe that government would say it was right in the current situation, even if they were mindful of Eichmann and Nuremberg, and that uninvolved scientific purists (no criticism implied) would say No?”

I didn’t want to attack you; but your words immediately brought the Eichmann defense up for me… unfortunately i didn’t check whether somebody else already argued along the same lines so i just replicated stuff…

Yes, governments would of course say it was right. Scientific integrity doesn’t matter to a government.

2) As has been correctly stated elsewhere in this thread, there is no denying the physics of CO2 energy absorption. There is, however, no shortage of those who exaggerate (in the extreme) the potential warming associated with those properties:

Ecclesiastical Uncle says: (April 9, 2011 at 10:12 pm)As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.

How dangerous would you be with your full mind!
Thank you, Uncle. A nice balance. A nice maturity. But be cautious in displaying wisdom in a world almost describable as wisdom-free.

The attacks on the work must continue, but do try and lay off the people!

I hope you don’t take this any more personally than it needs to be, but that is a *catastrophic* moral inversion you’ve got there. A rough translation is that a theif should be forgiven where a vandal is not because at least the thief benefits from his crime.

How about “no?” ‘Cause I’m gonna go with “no.”

I know that bureaucrats and functionaries in general feel strongly that they should be protected to one extent or another from the consequences of their decisions, whereas I believe it is fairly self-evident that there are many thousands of such persons who should be in jail but who are wealthy instead.

People’s insulation from the consequences of their action fosters corruption and incompetence, the universal stereotype of bureaucracy everywhere.

The corruption is the disease, the lies and harmful regulations are the symptom.

Hah! When I was reading Pamela’s post, Theo, I was amused, and rather delighted, to see her use the word “sissy”.
It is not a word one hears or sees much anymore, and I silently applauded Pamela for using it, even though I have observed that she is not one to be tied by such petty policy (which she demonstrates on a regular basis).

“they thought up the absurd excuse that the MWP was only a regional phenomenon”

As is the current global warming, as there are many contiguous temperature records, faithfully and accurately produced by dedicated amateurs, from surface stations in many different locations around the world which happen to show no warming at all at those locations, (and there are many others which do). Surely that also only points to a regional warming currently, instead of a global warming?

“The entire CAGW edifice is designed to eliminate modern energy production and the benefits that brings. What I find incomprehensible is that so many people are willing, even eager, to stake our energy supply and our civilization on something as unpredictable as the weather!”

Well it’ll happen because we choose to do it, or because we are forced to do it when the oil and gas runs out in a few years time.

I think it’s better to plan to do something about it now rather than weight until you have no other choice and little time to dean with the situation.

RGates: I think you know what this is all about, but in case you don’t it’s about a scientist who collected proxies and because they didn’t fit his desired outcome ignored them. Not only did he ignored them, he failed to mention he’d ignored them. The reason he ignored them was that the HockeyTeam to which he’d been recruited were making every effort to persuade people that the twentieth century uptick you refer to was unprecedented. They had to do this because thinking people would look at the MWP and ask how that temperature increase occurred, which I’m sure you understand. If there was a MWP and there are around 100 times more published papers showing there was than hockeysick (deliberate) papers, then twentieth century warming wasn’t unprecedented and the link to CO2 emissions could be challenged.

What I can’t get my head round is why no one has broken ranks, I’m convinced they’ve been up to no good, the evidence is there in the climategate emails, and their desire to stifle scientific work that doesn’t fit their plans. But they must, somewhere in the darkest recesses of their minds, understand that this will all come out at some time or other and they will finish in the Science Hall of Infamy, their names forever associated with scientific fraud. They’ve probably gone to far to pull back now, but they know what’s coming to them.

DirkH says:
[Dave Springer] SOMETHING is making the earth’s surface 39C warmer and it must be either or both of the fact there is an atmosphere and global ocean.
[…] This is where the atmospheric greenhouse comes in.

Based on 10 minutes skimming, I suspect the author, at certain points, confuses the emission temperature of the entire earth and atmosphere with the temperature at the earth’s surface. Take this for whatever it’s worth. Even if I get around to reading the thing closely, I won’t be doing it soon.

You have made several posts – most recently at April 10, 2011 at 7:31 pm – which dispute my post at April19 2011 4.57am (which has been supported by several others).

That post which you reject said:
“Acting under orders is NOT – and must always be prevented from being – a valid defence for any nefarious activity. Google Nuremburg Trials if you want to know why.”

Clearly, you have not studied those deliberations at Nuremburg or – if you did – you have failed to understand them.

The matter is a subject of both ethics and morality but has very important practical implications.

Yes, life can provide hard choices and often does. But the choice confronting the UEA-gang was not hard: it was merely a choice between honesty and a minor disagreement with a current employer.

Your adopted title suggests some interest in ecclesia so I point out that next Sunday is Palm Sunday and, therefore, my sermon will be addressing precisely the moral issue of choosing whether or not to ‘go with the crowd’. This is an issue on which you display complete ignorance and, therefore, I cordially invite you to attend my Service next Sunday or some other Christian Worship on that day.

My own take is….Conspiracy is not as out landish as it was once thought of.The main players clearly know what they were/are doing and the message that they want to be perceived by joe public,They may twist and turn but in the end will be found out. Al Cappone thought he was untouchable for his crimes….he was until they got him on tax avoidance one way or another these players of truth will face justice..

“The entire CAGW edifice is designed to eliminate modern energy production and the benefits that brings. What I find incomprehensible is that so many people are willing, even eager, to stake our energy supply and our civilization on something as unpredictable as the weather!”

Well it’ll happen because we choose to do it, or because we are forced to do it when the oil and gas runs out in a few years time.

I think it’s better to plan to do something about it now rather than weight until you have no other choice and little time to dean with the situation.

I suggest you read a bit more about hydrocarbon reserves. You appear to have been brainwashed by the greenie beenies in the point of peak Hydrocarbons.

“What I can’t get my head round is why no one has broken ranks, I’m convinced they’ve been up to no good, the evidence is there in the climategate emails, and their desire to stifle scientific work that doesn’t fit their plans. But they must, somewhere in the darkest recesses of their minds, understand that this will all come out at some time or other and they will finish in the Science Hall of Infamy, their names forever associated with scientific fraud. They’ve probably gone to far to pull back now, but they know what’s coming to them.”

Two reasons. One. Breaking ranks would be something like whistle-blowing. Tough to do. Reason Two. The nature of academia. Why has no one broken ranks on the claim that there is no downside to gay marriage. More to the point, why is debate about gay marriage, one among many issues, forbidden in academia? It is forbidden, you know.

Based on 10 minutes skimming, I suspect the author, at certain points, confuses the emission temperature of the entire earth and atmosphere with the temperature at the earth’s surface.”

I don’t think so; he’s talking about the sum of the radiation received (and thus also re-emitted) by Earth and compares that to the behaviour of an ideal blackbody to find out the temperature of that blackbody.

stephen richards says:
April 11, 2011 at 5:06 am
I’m a geologist who works in the oil industry, I probably know a lot more about oil reserves and the amount that is left than yourself.
————————————————————————————————-
Me too, Last survey I was on before retirement, it was estimated that there was more oil still in Iraq than was ever sucked out of Saudi Arabia.

Also, someone should check the coal reserves in Queensland, from the government web site, there is enough coal in Queensland to supply the world at current consumption rates to last another 3000 years.

I think you two hit the nail on the head: no one here is arguing about temps since the instrumental record began (sans proxies) and especially not since the satellite record began. The current technical controversy surrounds this fundemental reality:

You are about 9 months too early. Climate “science” doesn’t yet exist! Climate “science” would be a testable set of hypothesis, the application of scientific methodology and a scientific ethic – none of this exists in this subject.

Infancy? Think for of someone just waking up with a hangover to discover they are in a bed with some jerk and they are just trying to remember through the fuzz where they could buy the morning after pill!” (repeated for effect).

SM’s et al paper is an attempt at clarification of the facts so that a meaningful direction change can be made to correct the corrupt vector that has been persued by Jones, Mann, et al as directed by their task masters, technically speaking. And he’s done a great job, can’t wait for the rest. Politically…forget about it: the yo-yo’s in charge at the UN/IPCC and the NGO’s will be hard to convince.

I don’t think for a moment that this particular issue isn’t the result of a knowing manipulation of data to achieve a politically desirable outcome. Beyoond that, there is a persnal eagerness as well as an economic incentive to make one’s “scientific” study say something that everyone will notice. Mission accomplished by reckless disregard of the most important scientific principles.

Still, now that the nail is being driven into this coffin, it’s possible to ignore and repeat. After all, the policy has literally defined and directed the research from the beginning invalidating the results from the beginning. The human beings that used tools of science to support their ego or to effect a particular result for whatever the reason are not scientists. They just play one in real life.

Regarding basic education, they should stick to emphasizing the scientific principles as the defining characteristic rather than whether it “makes a difference.” Right now, it’s the exact opposite.

R. Gates: That “large uptick” in the late 20th century is nothing more than the PDO and AMO going positive. If you widen the time frame of your study, you will find that the arctic temperatures of late are not in the least bit unusual.

“The entire CAGW edifice is designed to eliminate modern energy production and the benefits that brings. What I find incomprehensible is that so many people are willing, even eager, to stake our energy supply and our civilization on something as unpredictable as the weather!”

Well it’ll happen because we choose to do it, or because we are forced to do it when the oil and gas runs out in a few years time.

SteveE would — no doubt — be surprised to learn that the USA has — in untapped resources — about 6 or 7 times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. And, one reaches that number by examining only a FEW of our untapped resources:

SteveE has, indeed been brainwashed — brainwashed into denying the vast hydrocarbon resources available in the USA, brainwashed into accepting “Peak Oil” dogma as an irrefutable religious creed and brainwashed into believing that only a Fascist form of Crony Capitalism can save us:

Each year we are using more oil than is being discovered, it’s not a question of will we hit peak all, it’s just a matter of when. Most estimates put it within the next 10-20 years with some suggestions saying we are already at the maximum capacity for oil production.

There’s always going to be plenty of oil in the ground, it comes down to a question of how much you are willing to pay to get it out as all the “easy” oil has already been extracted. Why do you think that there’s billions of barrels of undiscovered oil sitting in Iraq? An even if you are right it’s going to take decacades to build the infrastructure to get at it and extract it.

Saying there’s loads of coal left is all well and good, however my car doesn’t run on coal and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this regards.

Gas is nice but you need a pipeline or need significant quantities to make a LNG plant a vaiable option, and where it is viable they have probably already built or building one.

Have tried to comprehend this posted issue several times, but despite being reasonably intelligent and having been a physics major at school, I find it hard to follow.
May I suggest a simpler explanation designed for the novice to follow. There is to much pre knowledge required to really grasp the issue. Remember who the audience should be.

On a seperate note, Steve McI. has frequently made reference to the disclosure and data integrity requirements that must be met with a mining prospectus. It might be helpful to explore that subject in a little more depth. A mining prospectus is a document that is distributed by a company that seeks to raise capital in the public markets aka stock exchanges or from private investors. These offerings are one time events. Investors are not obligated to make further investment each year for the foreseeable future. The making of mis-statements, use of bodgy data (I like that term so had to use it), erroneous statistics, false claims, etc. are felonies that carry criminal penalties that nearly always include prison sentences. The amount of money that is at stake is usually in teh tens of millions of dollars U.S. Contrast that with the cost of what the climate “science” team, the Green Industry, our politicians et al are attempting to foist upon the public, a bill that will run into the trillions of dollars and will continue until our economies and societies collapse. And they face no criminal or other sanctions.

SteveE: While it is true that we using more oil than we are discovering, that is because the govt is not letting us drill or explore most of the best spots in the US. As to the claim that we will run out in 10 to 20 years, nothing could be further from the truth. The recent discover in Montana alone will last much longer than that. There’s enough shale oil alone to last us for over a hundred years. Add in the known, but not proven deposits and we have hundreds of years more in supply. Then there are the unknown but highly suspected deposits, such as those unexplored areas of the Gulf and off of our Pacific and Atlantic coasts, and we can go even longer. Beyond that there is natural gas and coal. (Coal to oil conversion was profitable back at $50-$60/brl)

I supose you have managed to keep yourself ignorant of the huge discoveries being made in the rest of the world. $100/brl oil has cause an explosion of exploration in areas previously not worth the effort. When oil goes to $200/brl in a century or so, the level of exploration will get higher still.

Ecclesiastical Uncle:
“And might not many of the failures to provide data in response to FOI requests and the like have been because they simply lost it? And because they eventually got round to looking for it amongst all sorts of discarded rubbish only to find it was in so much of a bxxxer’s muddle it could not be sent off, at least until it had been recreated or extensively cleaned up. Sloppy work and archiving rather than deliberate obfuscation?”

So, you are then saying that it would be reasonable for them to treat the core data behind their work as “discarded rubbish?”

Losing/destroying one’s raw data, especially on a project this large, is the scientific equivalent of eating one’s young. There is no excuse for this, and the most generous explanation is that these are a bunch of incompetents who should never be allowed near a lab.

“Well it’ll happen because we choose to do it, or because we are forced to do it when the oil and gas runs out in a few years time. ”

“I think it’s better to plan to do something about it now rather than weight until you have no other choice and little time to dean with the situation.”

Steve,
Oil/gas will only run out in the US because the current administration has an agenda to kill delay any fossile production. The peak oil lie in the US is a self fulfilling event because of all the restrictions the administration places on exploration and production.
And by the way, possibly you can explain why OBama is giving Brazil several billion dollars to drill offshore in deep waterwhile doing everything possible to stop offshore drilling here? OH yeah remember, Soros is an investor in PETRABRAS. How corrupt can thing get. The administration has been found by a US court in contempt for all the illegal manuvers to curtail drilling in the US. And to my surprise BP has been given permission to resume drilling in the Gulf while those who drill responsibly are still in limbo. BP is the last company I would all to drill offshore based on their horrible safety record on and off shore.
I suppose that due to your sources of information, you are totally unaware of the massive discoveries of Natural gas in the US and the corresponding discoveries of oil in the US besides the oil that Obama and the Dems in congrress have already locked up and prevented production. This is blindly believing the MSM with their agenda.

Steve says “Saying there’s loads of coal left is all well and good, however my car doesn’t run on coal and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this regards.”

“Gas is nice but you need a pipeline or need significant quantities to make a LNG plant a vaiable option, and where it is viable they have probably already built or building one.”

Steve, others have indicated that you are brainwashed.
I will avoid being be so blunt, but you do need to do your hgomework and realized that coal can be converted in a clean manner to liquid fuels for transportation at prices lower than making liquid fuels from corn, wood, switchgrass or other costly “phoney green” methods that are highly subsidized by the Administration. These so called green process conversions have been a technological failure. There are no commercial operating plants to make liquid fuels other than the subsidized corn ethanol industry. The EPA has significantly scaled back their initial outrageous assumption that we would manufacture ethanol from sources other than corn.
Also coal can be converted to electricity to run electric cars if and when a decent battery is invented, it is a waste of dollars to engineer the car or re fueling stations in the absence of a proper battery. The battery is the pinch point!!

There is already a massive pipeline system in place to distribute natural gas, it will probably be expanded by private investment as needed. For your info auto engines can be designed to run on natural gas and natural gas can be converted to a liquid fuel, the technology has existed for several decades, but it does not compete well with liquid fuels from crude oil unless the gas is stranded and really cheap.

The Anministration is wasting our hard earned tax dollars on alternative fuels that will never never meet our needs. Research is OK and useful, but building facilities where the technology is totally lacking is a waste.

I am curious after years of condescending sarcasm how Real Climate will respond to planetary cooling.

There is in the paleoclimatic record cycles of warming and cooling that correlate with solar magnetic cycle changes. The hide the decline Cabal has also has hidden cyclic abrupt climate change which correlates with a restart of the solar magnetic cycle after it has been interrupted.

If you are interested in an overview of the science Svensmark and Calder’s Chilling Stars is good place to start. (No sarcasm included, Svensmark is a meticulous conservative scientist.)

The solar specialist Lockwood has found 24 Maunder minimums in the last 1000 years of paleo solar data.

Solar cycle 24 is predicted to be the weakest cycle in 200 years. The magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspot groups continues to decline linearly. As the sunspots of the past cycle are the seeds for the next cycle and as the past cycle sunspots require a minimum field strength to survive their trip down through the turbulent convection zone to the solar tachocline, it appears solar cycle 25 will be a Maunder minimum.

If the 20th century warming was primarily due to solar magnetic cycle changes rather than C02 increases then the warming would not correlate with the CO2 changes. The scientific back peddling does begin.

Do global temperature trends over the last decade falsify climate predictions? Observations indicate that global temperature rise has slowed in the last decade (Fig. 2.8a). The least squares trend for Janu¬ary 1999 to December 2008 calculated from the HadCRUT3 dataset (Brohan et al. 2006) is +0.07±0.07°C decade–1—much less than the 0.18°C decade–1 recorded between 1979 and 2005 and the 0.2°C decade–1 expected in the next decade (IPCC; Solomon et al. 2007). This is despite a steady increase in radiative forcing as a result of human activities and has led some to question climate predic¬tions of substantial twenty-first century warming (Lawson 2008; Carter 2008).

“Each year we are using more oil than is being discovered, it’s not a question of will we hit peak all, it’s just a matter of when. Most estimates put it within the next 10-20 years with some suggestions saying we are already at the maximum capacity for oil production.”

Most who? Would that be the same people who ends up demanding we should all start living on one world under one government so much in touch with nature, excepting logic, and become vegans, oh and we should only use gold for purchasing power because for some reason, oil will run out “yesterday”, but gold, that has been mined for over four thousand years, we will, apparently, never run out off, and gold, apparently, exist in such vast quantities that everyone will get to put their hands in the treasure chests.

Why is it we supposedly ain’t gonna run out of rare earth metals anytime soon? :p

“Then you’d have to find a mechanism to explain this warming. Then you’d have to find a mechanism to explain this warming. Search as you might (and climate scientists have searched and continue to search everyday), it’s tough to find one that doesn’t include the forcing (and related feedbacks) brought about by the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700′s.”

Correlation does not mean causation, here is something the warmists are unable to grasp for reasons unknown. There have been warming and cooling cycles in the past at least equal to or greater than the tiny warming of the 19th/20th centuries while CO2 levels were not what they are today. Even now as CO2 levels rise we are not seeing global temperatures increase and indeed for the last decade they have not risen as predicted by the IPCC and the supposed consensus and their computer models promised.

Now your claim of temperature increases since the 1700s means nothing firstly because from the mid 18th to the early 19th the planet experienced a cool phase and as you know when cool phases end they lead to warming, you see this time after time in the geologic and ice core records. So starting your time series at the end of a cooling period when temperatures are low and when temperatures are rising is disingenuous and misleading.

If you take the end of the 17th/18th century cooling phase as the start line you see temperatures rise and then CO2 increase following NOT preceding, do you follow? At first glance you see CO2 and rising temperatures together and the two look to be linked but then you investigate the detail and the start and end of cooling and warming periods and you see the same thing again and again, cyclic warming and then CO2 rises which are followed by cooling and CO2 falling. The models failed, the predictions of the IPCC failed, climate science failed to accurately predict reality. The supreme test of any scientific model and theory is of course observed reality.

“Then you’d have to find a mechanism to explain this warming. Search as you might (and climate scientists have searched and continue to search everyday)”

If you do not look then you surely will never find, if you discount everything else before looking at anything else then no wonder you come to the wrong conclusion. Climate science began with the belief that CO2 induced and promoted warming and discounted everything else. The climate alarm industry ‘knew’ that CO2 caused warming before they could prove it and so armed with lavish funding they set out to prove what they ‘knew’, this is the error that underwrites the entire CAGW fraud.

Starting off with the conclusion beforehand and then working to provide evidence for that conclusion meant that the scientific method was turned on its head, the theory was understood as undeniable fact and then evidence was sought to provide the ‘undeniable fact’ with a solid foundation, in simple terms climate science built the house and then tried to build the foundations for it afterwards, not a good idea eh? Climate science was born in the quest to prove CO2 induced CAGW, it has failed spectacularly in that quest, it looks like what it really is, a pathetic charade played by increasingly pathetic and desperate people unable to admit failure.

As I understand it, science comes up with a theory which other scientists strive to disprove it and IF the theory survives that hurdle then it must also overcome the hurdle of observed reality. Climate science started on the basis that CO2 induced CAGW was a fact and then worked to prove it even as they arbitrarily dismissed other theories and contrary evidence and now we see the awful and inevitable finale on the horizon that will ruin careers and reputations and the consequences will reverberate through science for decades if not centuries.

Climate change is natural and cyclic, the simple and yet profound product of billions of years of planetary evolution. Our climate is nothing more or less the refined product of the planets position around our star and that stars journey round the galactic centre, it has evolved a hearty and robust life supporting mechanism that could be termed natural cyclic climate variation, it is not delicate or finely balanced and this has been proven over the aeons by its response to regular and gigantic shocks. I have visited the Deccan traps and stood in the caldera at Yellowstone, examine the truly massive earth shattering events and we see on one clear truth shine out, our home is perhaps the most robust system we know of in the universe and a trace gas amounting to 0.039% of our atmosphere is not going to bring about the end of the world where an asteroid six odd miles smashing into the earth wide could not.

stephen richards says:
April 11, 2011 at 5:06 am
I’m a geologist who works in the oil industry, I probably know a lot more about oil reserves and the amount that is left than yourself.

All due respect to your position/experience/field, but compared to Earth’s deep oceans our knowledge of the crust of the earth has got to be rather pathetic. The interesting thing is that we’re still discovering new life in Earth’s deep oceans, in entirely unexpected places. This tells me that we know next-to-nothing about what really happens beyond our ability to dig.

The only threat to the use and development of fossil fuels (hydrocarbons) here in Australia is the imposition by our federal government of this new carbon dioxide tax.

Woodside Petroleum and others have announced that if the carbon (dioxide) tax goes ahead in Australia, they will walk away from their investments in Australia. The LNG project in Western Australia is worth $180 BILLION alone.

The one Yamal tree has the potential of closing down Australia’s economy. All we have here is our natural resources and can supply the rest of the world in Iron, Gas and Coal into the distant future.

All I can say is, thank God for Steven McIntyre, he may have just saved at least one whole country, stuck down here at the bottom of the world.

R Gates: “Then you’d have to find a mechanism to explain this warming. Search as you might (and climate scientists have searched and continue to search everyday), it’s tough to find one that doesn’t include the forcing (and related feedbacks) brought about by the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700′s.”

The real asnwer is an increase in bright sunshine hours due to a combination of the PDO and cleaning SO2 out of the air (SO2 peaked in 1981 and has dropped as the air was cleaned due to the Acid Rain scare).

Strangely enough, the IPCC search engine can never find the word sunshien on the IPCC site.

GIS Model E ignore changes in bright sunshine.

Bright sunshine is measure at hundreds of weather stations. The difference between a cloudy day and a sunny day can be hundreds of watts/per sq m (depending on time and time of year and location).

Just because you and the IPCC deliberately ignore the major driver of climate doesn’t mean CO2 causes any warming.

In reply to R.Gates’ Comment:
“See, the problem is, if you accept that the Arctic is warming, and is the warmest in at least 2,000 years, as shown in these completely independent non-tree ring related studies: (and you link BBC news story and USA Today story)

Then you’d have to find a mechanism to explain this warming. Search as you might (and climate scientists have searched and continue to search everyday), it’s tough to find one that doesn’t include the forcing (and related feedbacks) brought about by the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700′s.”

R.Gates, the 20th century warming is latitude specific with most of the warming at high latitudes. That observation provides support for Svensmark’s mechanism. (See Svensmark’s reference paper that discusses the Polar see-saw or as Svenmark calls it the Antarctic anomaly.) The observation that there has been a decline in cloud cover that correlates with and that can explain in excess of 70% of the warming is also relevant. (See Enric Palle’s attached paper.)

The current observational evidence does not support the extreme amplified CO2 warming with a factor of three warming due to feedbacks.

What the paleoclimatologist have failed to explain to the general public is the warming and cooling is cyclic. Paleoclimatic record shows cyclic warming and cooling punctuated by cyclic abrupt cooling, an example of which is the Younger Dryas event or the 8200 year ago abrupt cooling event.

(Remember the solar magnetic cycle was at it highest level in 8000 years for the last 50 years of the twentieth century.)

‘Borehole temperatures in the ice sheets spanning the past 6000 years show Antarctica repeatedly warming when Greenland cooled, and vice versa (Fig. 1) [13, 14]. North-south oscillations of greater amplitude associated with Dansgaard-Oeschger events are evident in oxygenisotope data from the Wurm-Wisconsin glaciation[15]. The phenomenon has been called the polar see-saw[15, 16], but that implies a north-south symmetry that is absent. Greenland is better coupled to global temperatures than Antarctica is, and the fulcrum of the temperature swings is near the Antarctic Circle. A more apt term for the effect is the Antarctic climate anomaly.

Attempts to account for it have included the hypothesis of a south-flowing warm ocean current crossing the Equator[17] with a built-in time lag supposedly intended to match paleoclimatic data. That there is no significant delay in the Antarctic climate anomaly is already apparent at the high-frequency end of Fig. (1). While mechanisms involving ocean currents might help to intensify or reverse the effects of climate changes, they are too slow to explain the almost instantaneous operation of the Antarctic climate anomaly.”

“Figure (2a) also shows that the polar warming effect of clouds is not symmetrical, being most pronounced beyond 75◦S. In the Arctic it does no more than offset the cooling effect, despite the fact that the Arctic is much cloudier than the Antarctic (Fig. (2b)). The main reason for the difference seems to be the exceptionally high albedo of Antarctica in the absence of clouds.”

“Fig. 2 shows the global annual averages of GCR induced ionization in the atmosphere and low cloud amounts for the period July 1983–June 2000 (ionization data is only updated to December 2000). A quick look at the data reveals the good agreement between those two quantities from 1983 to 1994, however, from 1995 to 2000 the correspondence breaks.

On average, for a given cloud cell, about 3–4% of all other cloud cells trend over approximately the past two decades is seen in both the total cloud amount reported by ISCCP (not shown), and the low cloud data (Figs. 2 and 3). A simple linear fit to the yearly low cloud data (Fig. 2) has a slope – 0:065%/yr. If this trend is subtracted from the low cloud data the correlation coefficient rises from 0.49 to 0.75, significant at the 99.5% level.”

“The dependence of the correlation on latitude suggests that whichever mechanism might be acting to couple the low cloudiness with the solar signal (or GCR) it operates only in certain latitude bands. This could be taken to indicate that the latitudinal variation is controlled by a combination of at least three factors including: (1) the requirement that the clouds were in a liquid state, (2) the known latitudinal variation in cosmic ray flux, and (3) an electroscavenging process operating on liquid clouds (Tinsley and Yu, 2003), dependent on current density changes in the global electric circuit, which have a different latitudinal variation.”

There is smoking gun evidence that cyclic changes to the sun is the cause of both the cyclic warming and cooling and the very, very, abrupt cooling events like the Younger Dryas and termination of the past interglacial warm periods.

For example the paper: “The role of solar forcing upon climate change” Published 1999. (At the time of the paper’s publishing the author knew there was correlation with the solar magnetic cycle but did not understand the mechanisms. The mechanisms by which solar magnetic cycle changes affect the planet’s climate are understood now (explained in published papers) with the exception of the solar magnetic cycle restart that correlates with cyclic abrupt climate change events. Recently it has been shown the cyclic abrupt climate events correlate with cyclic abrupt changes in orientation of the geomagnetic field’s axis (10 to 15 degrees) and rotational axis of the planet. The strongest of the cooling events (termination of the interglacial periods and the Younger Dryas cooling event) correlate with geomagnetic excursions at which time the geomagnetic field becomes non-dipole with overall field intensity reduction by a factor of roughly 5 to 6.

When the geomagnetic field’s axis is tilted off of the rotation axis of the planet (By the solar event. With time a counter emf generates a field that is again aligned with rotational axis of the planet.)the GCR strikes lower latitudes of the planet and causes cooling by creating more cloud cover at lower latitudes. At higher latitudes there is depending the specific location on the planet the orientation magnetic field warming and cooling depending on whether the change results in a relative increase or decrease in galactic cosmic rays that create ions in the atmosphere that cause ion mediated clouds to form.”

“… we show here evidence that the variation in solar activity is a cause for the millennial scale climate change.”

Last 40 kyrs
Figure 2 in paper. (From data last 40 kyrs)… “conclude that solar forcing of climate, as indicated by high BE10 values, coincided with cold phases of Dansgaar-Oeschger events as shown in O16 records”

Don Shaw says: April 11, 2011 at 11:03 am
“The peak oil lie in the US is a self fulfilling event because of all the restrictions the administration places on exploration and production.”

How can something that happened over 40 years ago be a lie. It is not that it is going to run out, but the difficulty and cost of either extracting oil or converting from other sources that will increase. Oil is a very useful energy source that has many advantages over other types.

How can something that happened over 40 years ago be a lie. It is not that it is going to run out, but the difficulty and cost of either extracting oil or converting from other sources that will increase. Oil is a very useful energy source that has many advantages over other types.

1) Political tyranny is the ONLY thing preventing the USA from developing our vast hydrocarbon resources. If this is not the case, why do the Dims find it necessary to prevent our energy companies (through FORCE OF LAW) from developing those resources?

Like ALL assessments of Peak Oil, the EIA analysis examines ONLY those resources which global governments have allowed to be developed. Open up our VAST resources and the entire world will EASILY have enough inexpensive oil to last for at LEAST the next 100 years:

If government would simply get out of the way, private enterprise will — when the time is right — develop the next generation of energy sources which are practical for the real world. If government does NOT get out of the way, we will NEVER GET THERE (the outcome I believe to be virtually certain in the age of global tyranny).

That much is apparent.. or you are an artful dodger, feigning lack of understanding. Your comments come across as careful apology for individual and bureaucratic malfeasance, attempting exoneration by selective explanation of individual actions that never acknowledges the individuals responsibility to not lie, cheat, or steal. I find that repugnant, to put it mildly.

If your parents didn’t ingrain the fundamentals of honesty in you at an early age, you will have difficulty understanding it now. It comes down to this: We always have a choice. We can be honest and ethical or we can be deceitful cheats.
You choose – I’ve made mine.

Speaking of late night insomnia, I highly recommend you grab this completely free piece of software for Windows, Mac, and Linux which reduces the color temperature of your monitor at night, and gives you back nice bluish colors (normal), the color of the Sun, during the day. It was made by the guy who developed Google’s Picasa, so it’s a legitimate piece of software (and I love it; pretty much everyone who tries it does).

Once you install it and configure it with your location, you do nothing at all. Yet I bet you dollars to doughnuts that you feel more relaxed working with your computer at night once you get used to it (a day or s0). Less “burn your eyes out bright” and more “serene, peaceful, gets out of the way so you can work late at night, but paradoxically, doesn’t artificially keep you up by mimicking the Sun).

“All these people were merely doing their jobs … the way people have behaved is the consequence of the institutional arrangements”

Have a think about this. One of the other long term lefty scams, that of labour market regulation, is partly to blame for this.

Set minimum wages. Tell people it’s for their own good. Sell it as a “safety net”. Say that it stops “exploitation”. Make the gullible masses think that “the government” is looking after them.

Either ignore, or fail to understand, the real effects. Pricing people out of jobs, so that permanent unemployment results. Those in jobs have less security and market power. Those out of work have very little or even none.

Then, in response to permanent unemployment of those who are most disadvantaged, instead of removing the regulation that destroyed their opportunity, create antidiscrimination laws, and associated parasitic bureaucracies, to stop people choosing those they wish to employ, rather than leaving the market to clear itself and permit people to demonstrate their true value and work their way up. More dumbing down.

Then wonder why parasitic jobs flourish and people in such jobs willingly tolerate and even perform corruption in their work.

Not hard to see the connection with the fact that people in shonky research jobs are afraid to speak out.

“The question is how is the institutional situation to be arranged so that all those who work within it are free of the dilemma of whether to behave ethically or whether to do what their employer wants. Evidently, the answer is not obvious to government (or to me).”

Wise up the majority. Then the scam of labour market regulation can be abolished. Good luck with that.

“I expect all but a few of us here would have behaved in much the same way in the same circumstances”

No again. Maybe a few, but I feel that the great majority of people who post on Anthony’s excellent blog would expose and if necessary quit.

“If blame has to be placed somewhere, I suppose it should be with Government.”

Absolutely not. Certainly, governments have failed dismally on the climate hoax matter, as in other matters including the labour market one that I mentioned, but ultimately every individual capable of exercising discriminating judgment must do so to avoid easily corrupted power seekers, ie basically weak paranoid people, getting themselves into positions of power.

“the UEA crew departed from that path in order to establish a particular truth”

You mean a particular lie, or set of lies. No lie can be established as a truth, only misinterpreted as one.

“try and lay off the people” by which I assume you mean “try to lay off the people”

Again, absolutely not. Feed them with valid information. Expose them. Make them squirm increasingly until the continuation of their corrupt parasitic jobs becomes even more uncomfortable than exiting into the corrupted labour market with the risk of not being able to find another job any time soon.

Staying in their jobs longer, until the excrement finally and spectacularly impacts the air circulation apparatus, would mean that they would be even less likely to find work again in a similar field.

Matthew said “Losing/destroying one’s raw data, especially on a project this large, is the scientific equivalent of eating one’s young. There is no excuse for this, and the most generous explanation is that these are a bunch of incompetents who should never be allowed near a lab.”

I agree, including with the “most generous explanation” bit.

“They would defend themselves by claiming that they were only bending the truth a little and that such behaviour is commonplace amongst the politicians for whom they work.”

As above, the answer is in wising up the masses, not in permitting more excuses.

“So, I suppose, if you shoot the crew, you shoot the lot. Well, now, that’s an idea”

Now, that is an idea.

Electoral power wielded by people who are sufficiently wise to be free and remain so is the answer.

Thanks for that. Exactly the kind of reasoned data that keeps me partially skeptical that CO2 is the only culprit involved in causing the Arctic to be the warmest in 2,000 years. Excellent…thanks again.

“All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found. Now comes the harder work in finding and producing oil from more challenging environments and work areas. ”
— William J. Cummings, Exxon-Mobil company spokesman, December 2005

“It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive. ”
— Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, October 2008

“[World] reserves are confused and in fact inflated. Many of the so-called reserves are in fact resources. They’re not delineated, they’re not accessible, they’re not available for production. ”
— Sadad I. Al-Husseini, former VP of Aramco, presentation to the Oil and Money conference, October 2007

If there was plenty of easily accessable oil in the US then why are you a net importer of oil?

It’s because the oil you have in the ground cost more to get out the ground than it’s worth on the open market. Now if you’re happy for the price of oil to be +$200 a barrel then yeah you have lots of oil. I doubt most of the people can afford that price though and the increase in cost of everything that goes with it.

A typical oil field might leave about 50% of the oil in the ground, not because they can’t get it out, but because it costs more to extract it than the can sell it for.

As an energy source oil is pretty cheap, but that’s the problem, the cheap oil is running out.

Yeah you can convert coal and natural gas to run your cars, the reason it’s not being done is because oil is cheaper. So if you want to use those methods then the cost is going to have to go up which is my original point.

It’s better to find alternative source to oil now rather than wait until oil is $250 a barrel and be forced to.

“The entire CAGW edifice is designed to eliminate modern energy production and the benefits that brings. What I find incomprehensible is that so many people are willing, even eager, to stake our energy supply and our civilization on something as unpredictable as the weather!”

Well it’ll happen because we choose to do it, or because we are forced to do it when the oil and gas runs out in a few years time.

SteveE would — no doubt — be surprised to learn that the USA has — in untapped resources — about 6 or 7 times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. And, one reaches that number by examining only a FEW of our untapped resources:

————-

Resources are not reserves, the earth’s mantle has lots of diamonds in it, doesn’t mean it’s cost effective to mine ’em out though.

The US has lots of potential for oil shale, but there is currently not significant production from them as they cost a lot to get out the ground. More than the oil is worth on the open market at the moment.

10-20 years is when peak all will be reached, not run out. At this point the price of oil will increase dramatically. We’ve seen the price increase by 50% due to the unrest in teh middle east. What do you think will happen when there isn’t enough production to meet demand?

“I supose you have managed to keep yourself ignorant of the huge discoveries being made in the rest of the world.”

You mean like the Tupi field in Brazil? 7-8 billion barrels of oil that is recoverable when current global consumption is ~30 billion barrels a year.

It should also be noted that you can’t just turn the taps on and produce the oil, it’ll take decades to produce all the oil from a multi-billion barrel field.

It makes me laugh that many people on this blog say that they are sceptical about climate change and that you shouldn’t believe what the scientists tell them.

However they are perfectly fine with being told that there’s loads of oil left in the US and everything is fine, no need to worry.

Even if comsumption remains flat the world will have used 750 billion barrels of oil in that time, a few billion barrels on the Atlantic margin won’t even make a dent.

They claim that there is loads of oil in the Atlantic margin… how much has been found on the Atlantic margin of the UK, France, Spain and Norway? A few billion barrels? Global consumption is 30 billion a year! Even if you discovered it in the next 5 years it’d take another 5 to start extracting it and then at least 10-15 years to produce it.

There might be production from oil shales, but that hasn’t been done in any significant amount because it costs much more than it does to produce oil and gas and so isn’t economical.

Oil won’t run out, but the rate at which it can be produced will become less than the rate at which it is being consumed.

Am I missing something – I don’t see this as a “game changer” just another example of poor communication and some sloppiness by scientists rushing about their work. Any feedback on exactly why UEA opposed the FOI request?

At April 12, 2011 at 1:20 am you assert:
“Yeah you can convert coal and natural gas to run your cars, the reason it’s not being done is because oil is cheaper.”

No, it is not “cheaper”. The reason crude oil continues to be used is infrastructue investment.

There is plenty of oil. ‘Peak Oil’ is an urban myth. And the possibility of oil-from-coal is one of the several reasons why.

Therefore, you are wrong when you assert that, “It’s better to find alternative source to oil now”. People will look for alternatives if they still need oil when it starts to become scarce which – at the earliest – would be centuries in the future. Monies spent on finding alternatives now would probably be a waste because we cannot know if oil will be needed centuries in the future.

SteveE, are you being deliberately dense? The reason why we are not producing more oil in the US is because the govt has made it illegal to do so. As to the claims that the easy oil has been found, please define “easy”. I suspect they are talking about the oil that can be extracted for $5 to $10/brl, such as Saudi oil. There’s a huge continuum of oil, all the way from practically free to thousands of dollars a barrel.

Finally, I mention one of the recent large finds, you counter by saying this one find is not enough to supply the world’s needs.

Well, duh. Nobody said it was. It doesn’t have to. The other fields are still producing, and I only mentioned one of the recent finds.

This is my last reply to you, since you have obviously closed your mind to any information that doesn’t fit your agenda.

Has the Artic Sea Ice News and Analysis gone soft while the ice has gotten hard???? Seems they are a bit more humbled by weather than usual. Maybe my coined phrase, “Weather Pattern Variation” is starting to gain some traction.

“This year the older, thicker ice has increased somewhat over last year, although it remains younger than the 1979 to 2000 average ice age. Data through the third week of March shows an increase in sea ice one to two years old, and older than two years old, compared to recent years…

The distribution of old and young ice at the end of March 2011 also looks different than the standard comparison period of 1981 to 2000. Winds and ocean currents this winter resulted in an unusual tongue of old ice extending from north of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago into the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, in a region that used to be dominated by old ice that usually survived the summer melt season. A similar tongue of old ice appeared in March 2010, which almost completely melted away during the summer of 2010. Whether the tongue of old ice seen this spring melts away this summer will depend largely on ocean temperature and the weather patterns that set up over the next six months.”

Finally, I mention one of the recent large finds, you counter by saying this one find is not enough to supply the world’s needs.

Well, duh. Nobody said it was. It doesn’t have to. The other fields are still producing, and I only mentioned one of the recent finds.
—

Yes but you have to replace the 30 billion a year that is being produced, that is simply not happening. Currently about 15-20 billion a year is being discovered, and that’s only going to get less and less as the years go by.

I’d say you are the one who is being dense, probably not deliberately though.

——————————————–
I don’t think that’s a valid argument. Oil companies need to make efficient use of their resources by shifting investment between exploration and production. Why put money into discovering another trillion barrels or so when the current reserves are adequate?

——————————————–
I don’t think that’s a valid argument. Oil companies need to make efficient use of their resources by shifting investment between exploration and production. Why put money into discovering another trillion barrels or so when the current reserves are adequate?

———–

Because the value of the company is based on it’s assets, for an oil company that’s the oil reserves it holds. The only way to replace the oil that is being produced is by exploring for more or buying it from other companies.

If a company could book another few billion barrels of oil onto their reserves list they would do it in a second!

Companies are finding it harder and harder to discover new fields as all the obvious or easy places to look have already been done.

The fact that there’s less place to look mean that it’s going to be harder and harder to increase production to meet demand (baring in mind it can take 5-10 years between first discovery and first production). When we can no longer increase oil production that is peak oil.

Remember, “proven reserves” are those resources which governments have allowed energy companies to develop. Total resources include those (very well documented) resources which politicians have not allowed energy companies to develop.

He tells us Coal Liquefaction is cost prohibitive. Yet, South Africa has been doing it on a commercial scale since 1955 and American companies are working on it as we speak:

Environmental concerns are the most frequently cited excuse for delay. But, the government has already published the most stringent standards in the world and STILL will not allow the energy companies to even try to meet those standards:

10-20 years is when peak all will be reached, not run out. At this point the price of oil will increase dramatically. We’ve seen the price increase by 50% due to the unrest in teh middle east. What do you think will happen when there isn’t enough production to meet demand?

Oil prices soar when global demand exceeds global supply. Unrest in the Middle East is a factor only in so far as it has the potential to reduce supply. As prices soar, consumption declines, the balance between supply & demand is restored and prices drop.

Peak Oil will not result in an endless spiral of soaring prices. It will be very much like what we have seen in 2008 and 2011. There will be brief intervals of soaring prices followed by consumption adjustments and reduced prices:

The REAL problem is the economic disruption brought about by these price shocks.

As noted in both of the above links, we can — for at least the next 100 years — avoid these economic disruptions by voting the Dims out of power and developing our VAST domestic hydrocarbon resources. If political tyrants get out of the way, the economic growth powered by that domestic energy will allow private enterprise — when the time is right — to develop next generation of energy sources which are viable in the real world (as opposed to the alternative energy fantasies currently peddled by thieving corruptocrats).

Oil companies and governments want to make it look like they have more oil than they do. I’ve seen estimates for “proven” reserves that are nearly an order of magnitude out! That’s on the proven reserves!

And that really is getting away from the point about peak oil. It’s not that there isn’t any oil left, it’s that production can no longer be increased.

What is the current rate of extraction of shale oil in the US? Brazil’s total production is 1.4 million barrels a year, and thats the world’s largest operational surface oil shale pyrolysis reactor.

How much does shale oil cost compared to conventional oil? I see estimates of $50 – $110 a barrel compared to $10-$40 for conventional oil.

Coal-to-liquids has drawbacks. It takes 2 tonnes of coal and 15 barrels of water to make one barrel of synthetic oil. The IEA say that to supply just 10% of the US transport fuel consumption it’d take $70 billion of investment and raising coal production by 25% – 250 million tonnes per year!

Believe your rigth-wing dogma if you want. It doesn’t wash with me though!

You, sir, are a purely political brazen propagandist living in an Alice in Wonderland fantasy where up is down and down is up. You are utterly unworthy of my time!
——
Only because you can’t answer any of my questions and show a clear lack of understanding about what peak oil is.

How quickly can you produce shale oil or CTL at a commercial scale?

How much does it cost per barrel to produce?

Simple questions requiring simple answers, but you know that these cannot replace conventional oil production so you run away.

As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.

Well, this one does go on!

Because of the stir, I have reviewed my original post (April10 2011 2.03am) in order to check if I must concede that any criticisms, many very robustly put, are justified. I see I offered what I think was a plausible explanation of how people in the UEA, and subsequently others, came to a position where they are so scorned by many who inhabit this and other blogs, and subsequently added a similar thought about the handling of FOI act requests. I commenced with an expression of personal reservations about the reactions expressed here and concluded with an injunction to ‘lay off the people’.

I confess the severity of the reaction that this has provoked has surprised me. This is a lesson for me. But it is clearly old hat to that part of the government that interfaces with the science community and so Government scientific advisers and committees (including a Climate Change Committee) are appointed to man the frontier and facilitate dialogue.

Now to the criticisms. I did not offer my personal assessment of the merits of the behaviour of the actors involved. Who should care what I think? So criticisms of my personal opinions and morality on such a basis appear to be without foundation.

I did, however open with my reservations about the odium poured on the people involved. Because, to me, it seemed exaggerated and misplaced and based upon the assessment that these were people who knowingly embarked upon an enterprise they knew to be fraudulent. However, this does not seem to me to have been the case.

The description of what actually happened that I gave does not seem to have elicited comment. I am not aware that I have been accused of misrepresentation in this context. However, my conclusion – that commiseration would be more appropriate than excoriation – and the reasoning that lead me to it have been much ridiculed and I have been accused of numerous offences. So be it, my opening remarks were the expression of what I felt, and I must live with the consequences of sharing the thought. I add here, however, that I note the absence of the milk of human kindness towards these unfortunate souls.

Some points of interest do seem to have arisen, however. Firstly, when considering my evaluation of the UEA crew, I do mean commiseration rather than excoriation because the esteem of the UEA crew amongst their peers can hardly have been enhanced by what has happened. Will they not, even in the most conservative of scientific circles, be seen to have been involved in a business that turned out to be rather unfortunate?

Then, there is the significant question of the distortion of science for a particular end. Clearly distorted science is not science at all. Rather, it is something akin to selling or politics where distortion or selection of data is standard technique. So should scientists be involved in such work? . Well, OK, clearly no in a perfect world. And in the case at issue, part of the real world, the UEA crew now seem to have distorted the science in an unacceptable way. But I have to ask if they realized they were doing so at the time.

Then there is the issue of whether following the instructions of a superior is sufficient reason for doing so. This question has been raised many times and a formulation that, at least, satisfies me, arrived at (April 10 2011 7.31pm re DirkH). Interesting nevertheless.

My exhortation to ‘lay off the people’ was mostly made with tactical considerations in mind. Apart from my own feelings on this, two examples of the views of significant luminaries come to mind. (1) In a recent interview, Sir Paul Nurse said he was not confrontational and, in an appalled voice, deplored the internet because, as I recall, ‘people were rude to one another’ there. (2) In the recent Spectator debate, I understand that Simon Singh, who I believe plays at being a scientific populist as well as doing serious work in an unrelated field, displayed a ranking of scientific sources that ranked blogs last. IMHO, this will probably, at least in part, be because of the invective that flies around in them. Now I doubt that either of these two luminaries cuts much ice with climate skeptics, but would suggest that both of then enjoy significant success in the wider community. Part of the reason for this is their friendliness and ability to charm the leg off an iron pot. Drawing attention to mistakes or malfeasance by climate activists is offensive to them. These people are an important, but relatively weak part of the Government’s climate change edifice. Government knows it knows nothing of the intricacies of climate science, and so relies on the opinions of these (and other similar) people. However, they themselves know that they know very little about climate science and so rely on the opinions of others. Climate skeptics are going to have to convert these people to their point of view, and in order to do so, must cosy up and avoid criticism of the people that the luminaries have often been assured do good work. Instead, the line should be that small mistakes were made as has now conclusively been shown etc etc. By such means, I think, will the climate change war be won.

So much for that

After this posting, I do not intend to contribute again unless something interesting comes up or I find I have made a mistake that needs correction.

Re DirkH April 10 2011 9.18pm

So we agree about the applicability of the defense that the actors involved in our drama were merely doing their job.

Re Roger Carr April 10 2011 120.42pm

Thank you. The quality of the argument I started here has, indeed, been an eye-opener but, although now bloody, I remain unbowed. I felt the points needed to be made and hope some of them will have sunk in.

Re Merovign April 10 2011 11.36pm

No offence taken. You are the soul of discretion!

For the reasons that prompt me to urge that it is appropriate to lay off the people, see my introductory remarks above before the answers to specific posts.

Of course bureaucrats, in common with everybody else, would like to be free of restraints of any sort. But few structures, bureaucratic or not, permit this. Of course, in practice, governments tend to be less controlled than other bodies, partly I think because the issues they face are rarely black and white, as well as because (1) there is rarely a market to enforce discipline, and (2) quis cusodiet etc. Eternal vigilance is the best remedy we have, but is often found wanting.

Re Richard S Courtney April 11 2011 4.07am.

No, of course I have not studied the deliberations at Nuremberg – life is too short and I missed the condensed version that so many who have posted here must, I think, have seen. However, I doubt sufficient comprehension of the issue requires detailed knowledge – the issue is plain enough. I agree about its seriousness. I gave a better statement of my position in that part of my post directed to DirkH (April 10 2011 7.31pm) than I favoured you with in my post of April 10 2011 7.04am I apologise.

I add that I have assumed that the disagreement the UAE crew would have had with their management if they opted out of pursuing the objective I guess they were given by the government would be major, and not minor at all. If this is wrong, then I would have to reassess my views about what they did.

I advise you not to draw inferences from my adopted name and do not think reference to religion helps comprehension of the issues under discussion. I hope that re-evaluation of my postings will help you to revise your evidently very low opinion of me.

Re my routine declaration, firstly I regret you find it boorish. Then, I am open to persuasion on this. I think it helps readers to assess a contribution if they know something about its author. I have assumed from inspection of posts by others that this forum is mainly frequented by scientists and other scientifically literate folk. I felt it necessary to make it plain that I am not in that company. For the benefit of occasional visitors I have felt it necessary to post my routine delaration at the head of every post. I agree it as tedious for frequent visitors to read it as it is for me to write it.

Re MarkW April 11 2011 7.41am

See comments on Richard Courtney above.

Re Matthew April 11 10.47 am.

No, it is not reasonable (or maybe better acceptable) to lose data, but I guess that is what may have happened. These people will, I think, have been very busy at the time and maybe lacked proper resources.

I entirely agree with your evaluation of the situation in which what happened has left them.

Re Mac the Knife April 11 2011 6.30pm

I am sorry you have not clarified your point so I still do not understand your comments and further constructive dialogue is frustrated.

In the main, I have not sought to offer any apology for what happened, only a possible explanation of how it came about. I do not want to stray into the science because I know too little to comment. However, I think it likely that the masters of the UEA crew pushed them too hard and now leave them to face the music.

In addition, your choice is made retrospective to the action with the benefit of hindsight; whereas I doubt the issue was as clear at the time as it has later become. I disagree that the UEA crew must have recognised they had a choice about whether to be ethical or deceitful.

I suggest it would be more seemly to forbear from the sort of comments you make in your last paragraph.

Re Laurie Williams April 11 2011 10.58pm

Most of this post seems to be political theory and rather remote from the more narrow issues surrounding climate science that are of interest, so I do not think it right to comment. I have not thought in such broad terms and cannot rely on experience for help.

Then however, there is a reference to my thought that Government should make itself responsible for sorting out the imperfections arising from conflicting institutional objectives. This was, of course, a counsel of despair as I see no prospect that Government can ever properly address the issue because of its overriding responsibility for preventing waste of public funds.

I agree that the particular ‘truth’ the Government sought may have been a lie, but observe that unfortunately it is the sort of lie that is commonplace in the political class

Re ‘lay off the people’ see the remarks above my comments on individual posts, Re loss of data see Re Matthew above.

Re the defense concerning bending the truth, I add that I doubt that there will ever be any sort of formal trial over the issue. However, I also doubt that the scientific community or the court of public opinion will ever fully accept this defense if it were offered.

“Stalin’s team of scientists and engineers found that oil is not a ‘fossil fuel’ but is a natural product of planet earth – the high-temperature, high-pressure continuous reaction between calcium carbonate and iron oxide – two of the most abundant compounds making up the earth’s crust. This continuous reaction occurs at a depth of approximately 100 km at a pressure of approximately 50,000 atmospheres (5 GPa) and a temperature of approximately 1500°C, and will continue more or less until the ‘death’ of planet earth in millions of years’ time. The high pressure, as well as centrifugal acceleration from the earth’s rotation, causes oil to continuously seep up along fissures in the earth’s crust into subterranean caverns, which we call oil fields. Oil is still being produced in great abundance, and is a sustainable resource – by the same definition that makes geothermal energy a sustainable resource.”

(The statement that “centrifugal acceleration” assists the oil to rise is wrong. It would have the opposite effect, by effectively lightening the rock to a greater degree than the oil. If the earth were spinning at a rate sufficient to precisely counter the effect of gravity at the depth of formation of such oil then it would stay under the rock – although of course in such an environment it would not form, at least not at anywhere near the same rate, because of lack of pressure.)

Similar information is quoted in other places. A search on “running into oil” is a useful starting point, although not all articles thus found mention abiotic oil.

This is from The Guardian, so perhaps it was published to assist in maintaining the impression that we must continue to panic because of the great potential for never ending amounts of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere from the never ending oil supply, but is typical of statements on the web on this point:

“Meanwhile, proven oil reserves worldwide continue to expand – every year more oil is added to reserves than is used. It is thus a fact that the world is running into oil rather than out of it.
Peter Odell is professor emeritus of international energy studies at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and author of Why Carbon Fuels Will Dominate the 21st Century’s Global Energy Economy”

“Why is it then that every producing oil and gas field in the world has biological markers that can only be formed through biologcal processes?”

Firstly, my guess at an answer: mixing.

Secondly, much more important: never make the error of assuming that the only possibility that you know is the only possibility.

That second point also applies to dismissal of the possibility of abiotic oil as “ridiculous”.

Considering that this blog is concerned mainly with the global warming scam and the big corrupt interests driving it, perhaps the most relevant point of all to the matter of oil quantities is this, from the same CFP article linked by Marion:

“Needless to say, the last people to tell us the truth about oil will be the oil producers and oil companies, for they of course have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth that oil is a fossil fuel and that it will soon be exhausted”

The obviously relevant question in this debate about oil reserves and usage is how rapidly abiotic oil is produced.

A thought I had for the first time a moment ago. Volcanoes emit vast quantities of many different substances, including sulphur and carbon, elementally and in various compounds, and water. If “abiotic generation of hydrocarbons is laughable” then where do volcanically released compounds and elemental forms of such materials come from?

I enjoy your comments and the way you write. The one disagrement we probably have is your request to ‘lay off the people.’ For most, I agree; the rank-and-file scientists always have it in the back of their minds that if they speak truth to power, their next pay raise, or their next promotion, or even their job may be seriously endangered.

But the inner clique, led by Michael Mann and his pals, should be exposed for exactly what they are: deceitful scientists who have gamed the climate peer review system, intimidated any others with contrary views, and who are deliberately promoting BS [bad science] by always avoiding the scientific method, and going out of their way to attack and squelch any contrary views.

They get away with their scientific charlatanism because their institutions benefit financially from their gaming of the system. Everyone else loses – big time – while their inner clique personally benefits. To the extent that the demonization of “carbon” is successful, society will be forced to pay immense new taxes and groan under onerous, burdensome, unnecessary regulation – along with a large expansion of the bureaucratic class. That is why the spotlight must be directed personally at Mann, Briffa, Jones, and the rest of their clique. Their ongoing dishonesty is leading society down a very destructive path. And at some point, there must be a reckoning.

You say you “understand” but have not read the deliberations at Nuremburg which established (as intended for all time) that “acting under orders” is not – and must never be allowed to be – a justification for nefarious behaviour. And you say you have not read those deliberations or any of the several “condensed” accounts of those deliberations, but you “agree about its seriousness”.

However, your repeated comments here prove that you do not understand these matters in any way, so I offer you the following brief explanation.

Every organisation (i.e. social club, corporation, trade union, nation state, military force, etc.) has a structure. That structure may or may not be explicitly stated but it has a hierarchy. Hence, responsibility for any decision and/or action exists at the top of the structure (i.e. with the father, mother, gang leader, Chairman, General Secretary, President, Monarch, or etc.), and this is why e.g. senior politicians are called upon to resign if their government departments fail.

However, responsibility for implementing an action and/or decision rests with the person or persons who implement it. Otherwise all responsibility would reside at the top of the hierarchy and, therefore, a change to (or removal of) the top of a hierarchy would remove all responsibility and any accountability.

This is the clear logic that the Court at Nuremburg decided is a universal legal fact.

Also, that Court’s deliberations decided that those who implement a nefarious act should be called to account for what they did otherwise the universal legal fact would be pointless and meaningless.

So, the UEA-gang are responsible for what they have done. No amount of sophistry by you or anybody else can change that.

And the UEA-gang should be called to account for what they did. No amount of sophistry by you or anybody else can change that.

Furthermore, I have written nothing to justify your claim that I have an “evidently very low opinion of” you. Indeed, I know nothing of you, and you say you deliberately chose a misleading pseudonym, so I am not in any postion to make any judgement of you.

But I can and do reject your dangerous and amoral attempts at defences of unethical behaviour and those who have conducted it.

For completeness, I offer the following additional responses.

I see you have rejected my advice that you desist from your boorish practice of posting your “routine” introduction. That is your right, but only you can have responsibility for the impression it provides especially when that has been pointed out to you.

You say to me:
“I advise you not to draw inferences from my adopted name”.

I reply that I advise you to not adopt a name which clearly provides a fallacious indication. And I repeat my advise that a Palm Sunday sermon would provide you with much information to dispel your ignorance of the moral and ethical issues on which you have chosen to pontificate here.

“Government scientific advisers and committees (including a Climate Change Committee) are appointed to man the frontier and facilitate dialogue”

This statement shows a gross misunderstanding of political reality.

To “man the frontier”, certainly, but not necessarily to “facilitate dialogue”, and in many cases to do the opposite of that, to censor.

Like the IPCC, the Australian government appointed climate commission is most
certainly not for the purpose of facilitating dialogue, or finding truth, or making it available and widely known, but for pushing propaganda on the public. Big difference.

“I did not offer my personal assessment of the merits of the behaviour of the actors involved. Who should care what I think?”

All on this blog would care what you and others think “of the merits of the behaviour of the actors involved”. That is a core point of every policy debate.

Re harsh words about players in the game, you say “it seemed exaggerated and misplaced and based upon the assessment that these were people who knowingly embarked upon an enterprise they knew to be fraudulent. However, this does not seem to me to have been the case.”

They did. It is.

“my conclusion – that commiseration would be more appropriate than excoriation – and the reasoning that lead me to it have been much ridiculed”

Deservedly so.

Your grammar is mostly excellent, in contrast with others, but I think in this case you meant the past tense “led” rather than the present “lead”.

Your plaintive tone is similar to that of Phil Jones under pressure. Oh, poor little me. Don’t fall for that rubbish. These characters and those around them knew what was going on.

“the esteem of the UEA crew amongst their peers can hardly have been enhanced by what has happened. Will they not, even in the most conservative of scientific circles, be seen to have been involved in a business that turned out to be rather unfortunate?”

Same applies. Why the misdirected sympathy?

“Climate skeptics are going to have to convert these people to their point of view”

True. You referred to people disliking blogs because of the slagging (my term) done by anonymous people. But that does not mean that people with reasonable arguments to make should not state them.

“, and in order to do so, must cosy up and avoid criticism of the people that the luminaries have often been assured do good work. Instead, the line should be that small mistakes were made as has now conclusively been shown etc etc. By such means, I think, will the climate change war be won.”

More likely lost, if whining sympathy seeking corrupt manipulators like Jones, Mann etc are given the cotton wool treatment that you favour.

“I advise you not to draw inferences from my adopted name and do not think reference to religion helps comprehension of the issues under discussion.”

Then why do you choose to use that name?

I understand that some people comment under false names because they feel that their business relationships, careers or friendships could be damaged if others found out that they were writing horrible nasty climate denier comments on a horrible nasty climate denier blog run by that horrible nasty climate denier Watts, but I regard such fear as a good example of the gutless unprincipled behaviour that has been well discussed on this post.

I comment using my real name. My location of Adelaide is shown in some posts. Shock, horror, I can even be found on the internet using that information.

Why not comment using your real name?

“These people will, I think, have been very busy at the time and maybe lacked proper resources.”

No excuse for losing information that is not theirs to lose. What is the connection between being under resourced and losing things, or perhaps more accurately intentionally destroying or disposing of them?

Busy? Yes, busy fudging and obstructing.

“Re Laurie Williams April 11 2011 10.58pm

Most of this post seems to be political theory”

Economic theory. And solid in practice.

“and rather remote from the more narrow issues surrounding climate science that are of interest”

Not so! Read my reasoning again and try to understand the connection. Labour market distortion is an extremely serious debilitating scam that has been around for over 100 years, with effects that most people never consider.

Not “narrow” either. Very broad, extending into many matters, not just the climate scam.

“I see no prospect that Government can ever properly address the issue because of its overriding responsibility for preventing waste of public funds.”

At the risk of causing you to feel insulted, you really don’t get it.

Firstly, the two parts of your statement do not have the logical connection that you imply.

Secondly, wasting public funds is something that corrupt leftist governments do shamelessly, because the corrupters of government, who much more than the public are the effective employers of those in power, require it and the politicians thrive on it.

Until democracy bites back, which happens only when those guilty are plainly identified as such and dealt with accordingly, not with boo hoo sympathy cotton wool treatment.

Why is it then that every producing oil and gas field in the world has biological markers that can only be formed through biologcal processes?

Abiogenic petroleum is about as believable as creationism.”

———————————–

So the ‘warmists’ would have us believe, SteveE, but experience leaves me somewhat wiser than to believe all they tell us. You obviously have not followed the links (but not unusual in those who prefer beliefs to real science )

I’m sorry mate, but there is simply no evidence to support abiogenic petroleum. The mixing argument doesn’t work because there would be areas where there is no biogenic hydrocarbon generation that should contain just abiogenic hydrocarbons, this has never been observed.

The reason that volcanoes emit those gases and elements is that the magma is a product of melting rocks in the crust that contain them. Rocks that have been deposited in the oceans and basins around the World millions of years ago. Abiogenic petroleum relys on reactions in the Earth’s mantle, below the crust. No connection there.

4. In Situ production of methane under the conditions that exist in the Earth’s upper mantle. (PhysicsWeb; Sept. 14, 2004)

The likelihood of vast concentrations of methane in the mantle is very slim, given mantle xenoliths have negligible methane in their fluid inclusions. Further evidence is the presence of diamond within kimberlites and lamproites which sample the mantle depths proposed as being the source region of mantle methane.

In your opinion, what created the methane seas on Titan? Biological activity? Or biogenesis?

And methane [natural gas], is now hated by the enviros. Why is that? The eco crowd used to love natural gas. But ever since it became a viable salternative to oil, it is being demonized just like CO2.

Anyone who doesn’t see a coordinated agenda is blind. The cause of the increasing cost of energy, whether gasoline, natural gas or nuclear, must be laid at the feet of the environmental movement – which has been totally co-opted by the anti-American, anti-West Left.

Conservative free market proponents are far better stewards of the environment than the misguided eco-crowd, which insists on introducing non-native fish and frogs into new environments, like the folks that introduced kudzu to slow soil erosion. “Environmentalism” in general is simply a cover story to advance totalitarian world government.

As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.

Yes, a mistake.

In my last post (April 13 2011 3.19am) in my answers to Richard S Courtney I advised him not to draw inferences from my adopted name. This was wrong and totally contrary to what I intend. I should have advised him that the inference he made was incorrect.

Everybody is invited to draw inferences from my introductory confession: it is there to provide information so that my contributions can be read in some sort of context. But I limit the information to that which I think readers need to know. I withhold my name because it provides nothing (A Google search on it reveals only that someone with the same name, might be me, might not, has one son.) but would provide a platform for identity thieves.

So readers know more about me than I know about, say, Smokey or Laurie Williams. I find, however, that Richard S Courtney is a well established polemicist. Well, well!.

In your opinion, what created the methane seas on Titan? Biological activity? Or biogenesis?

———

It’s probably primodial methane, nearly every planet in our solar system has traces of it and several comets.

It’s all on the surface though and there is no evidence that there is any significant production or quantities of methane in the Earth’s mantle as we would have likely seen then from xenoliths and diamonds that have been derived from there.

Abiotic petroleum as an explanation for the World’s hydrocarbons just doesn’t stack up.

Thanks for linking the map of Titan though, I enjoyed reading about the possible life on the moon as an explaination for the high levels on methane. Probably have to wait until 2029 to find out though. Interesting stuff none the less!

Ecclesiastical Uncle says:
April 13, 2011 at 3:19 am
“In addition, your choice is made retrospective to the action with the benefit of hindsight; whereas I doubt the issue was as clear at the time as it has later become.”

EU,
While you certainly win the prize for blog verbosity, you make up for that with lack of understanding. Your attempt at ‘understanding’ quoted above fails, twice over. My choice to not participate in personal or bureaucratic deceit was and is made at the moment of their proposal. There was no need or time for ‘retrospective…benefit of hindsight… choice’. The choice was straightforward, as most ethical choices are. The issue was clear to me…. and I made my decision.

I have challenged others on other occasions to explain why they wanted me to participate in actions that I considered unethical. They offered dissembling relativism explanations much like yours. Under those circumstances, I chose and I choose to not participate. I always have a choice.